Desperation Read online

  "What did you say to it?" Johnny asked. "That was amazing. Was it Indian? Some Indian dialect?"

  The big cop laughed. "Don't know any Indian dialect," he said. "Hell, don't know any Indians. That was just baby-talk, like oogie-woogie, snookie-wookums."

  "But it was listening to you!"

  "No, it was looking at me," the cop said, and gave Johnny a rather forbidding frown, as if he were daring the other man to contradict him. "I stole its eyes, that's all. The holes of its eyes. I suppose most of that animal-tamer stuff is for the birds, but when it comes to slinkers like desert wolves ... well, if you steal their eyes, it doesn't matter what you say. They're usually not dangerous unless they're rabid, anyway. You just don't want them to smell fear on you. Or blood."

  Johnny glanced at the big cop's right sleeve again and wondered if the blood on it was what had drawn the coyote.

  "And you don't ever, ever want to face them when they're in a pack. Especially a pack with a strong leader. They're fearless then. They'll go after an elk and run it until its heart bursts. Sometimes just for the fun of it." He paused. "Or a man."

  "Really," Johnny said. "That's ..." He couldn't say tres creepy, he'd already used that one. "... fascinating."

  "It is, isn't it?" the big cop said, and smiled. "Desert lore. Scripture in the wasteland. The resonance of lonely places."

  Johnny stared at him, jaw dropping slightly. All at once his friend the policeman sounded like Paul Bowles on a bad-karma day.

  He's trying to impress you, that's all-it's cocktail chatter without the cocktail party. You've seen and heard it all a thousand times before.

  Maybe. But he still could have done without it in this context. Somewhere off in the distance another howl rose, trembling the air like an auditory heat-haze. It wasn't the coyote which had just run off, Johnny was sure of that. This howl had come from farther away, perhaps in answer to the first.

  "Oh hey, time out!" the cop exclaimed. "You better stow that, Mr. Marinville!"

  "Huh?" For one exceedingly strange moment he had the idea the cop was talking about his thoughts, as if he practiced telepathy as well as elliptical pretentiousness, but the big man had turned back to the motorcycle again, and was pointing at the lefthand saddlebag. Johnny saw that one sleeve of his new poncho--bright orange for safety in bad weather--was hanging out of it like a tongue.

  How come I didn't see that when I stopped to take a leak? he wondered. How could I have missed it? And there was something else. He'd stopped for gas in Pretty Nice, and after he'd topped the Harley's tanks, he'd unbuckled that saddlebag to get his Nevada map. He had checked the mileage from there to Austin, then refolded the map and put it back. Then he had rebuckled the saddlebag. He was sure he had, but it was certainly unbuckled now.

  He had been an intuitive man all his life; it was intuition, not planning, that had been responsible for his best work as a writer. The drinking and the drugs had dulled those intuitions but not destroyed them, and they had come back--not all the way, at least not yet, but some--since he'd gotten straight. Now, looking at the poncho dangling out of the unbuckled saddlebag, Johnny felt alarm bells start going off in his head.

  The cop did it.

  That was completely senseless, but intuition told him it was true just the same. The cop had unbuckled the saddlebag and pulled his orange poncho partway out of it while Johnny had been north of the road with his back turned, taking a piss. And for most of their conversation, the cop had deliberately stood so Johnny couldn't see the hanging poncho. The guy wasn't as starry-eyed about meeting his favorite author as he had seemed. Maybe not starry-eyed at all. And he had an agenda here.

  What agenda? Would you mind telling me that? What agenda?

  Johnny didn't know, but he didn't like it. He didn't like that weird Yoda shit with the coyote much, either.

  "Well?" the cop asked. He was smiling, and here was another thing not to like. It wasn't a goony I'm-just-a-fan-in-love smile anymore, if it ever had been; there was something cold about it. Maybe contemptuous.

  "Well, what?"

  "Are you going to take care of it or not? Tak!"

  His heart jumped. "Tak, what does that mean?"

  "I didn't say tak, you did. You said tak."

  The cop crossed his arms and stood smiling at him.

  I want out of here, Johnny thought.

  Yes, that was pretty much the bottom line, wasn't it? And if that meant following orders, so be it. This little interlude, which had started off being funny in a nice way, had suddenly gotten funny in a way that wasn't so nice ... as if a cloud had gone over the sun and a previously pleasant day had darkened, grown sinister.

  Suppose he means to hurt me? He's pretty clearly a beer or two short of a sixpack.

  Well, he answered himself, suppose he does? What are you going to do about it? Complain to the local ki-yotes?

  His overtrained imagination served up an extremely ugly image: the cop digging a hole in the desert, while in the shade of his cruiser lay the body of a man who had once won the National Book Award and fucked America's most famous actress. He negated the image while it was little more than a sketch. hot so much out of fear as by virtue of an odd protective arrogance. Men like him weren't murdered, after all. They sometimes took their own lives, but they weren't murdered, especially by psychotic fans. That was pulp-fiction bullshit.

  There was John Lennon, of course, but--

  He moved to his saddlebag, catching a whiff of the cop as he went by. For one moment Johnny had a brilliant but unfocused memory of his drunken, abusive, crazily funny father, who had always seemed to smell exactly as this cop did now: Old Spice on top, sweat underneath the aftershave, plain old black-eyed meanness under everything, like the dirt floor in an old cellar.

  Both of the saddlebag's buckles were undone. Johnny raised the fringed top, aware that he could still smell sweat and Old Spice. The cop was standing right at his shoulder. Johnny reached for the hanging arm of the poncho, then stopped as he saw what was lying on top of his pile of Triple-A maps. Part of him was shocked, but most of him wasn't even surprised. He looked at the cop. The cop was looking into the saddlebag.

  "Oh, Johnny," he said regretfully. "This is disappointing. This is tres disappointing."

  He reached in and picked up the gallon-sized Baggie lying on the pile of maps. Johnny didn't have to sniff to know that the stuff inside wasn't Cherry Blend. Stuck on the front of the Baggie, like someone's idea of a joke, was a round yellow smile sticker.

  "That's not mine," Johnny Marinville said. His voice sounded tired and distant, like the message on a very old phone answering machine. "That's not mine and you know it's not, don't you? Because you put it there."

  "Oh yeah, blame the cops," the big man said, "just like in your pinko-liberal books, right? Man, I smelled the dope the second you got close to me. You reek of it! Tak!"

  "Look--" Johnny began.

  "Get in the car, pinko! Get in the car, fag!" The voice indignant, the gray eyes full of laughter.

  It's a joke, Johnny thought. Some kind of crazy practical joke.

  Then, from somewhere off to the southwest, more howls rose--a tangle of them, this time--and when the cop's eyes rolled in that direction and he grinned, Johnny felt a scream rising in his throat and had to press his lips together to keep it in. There was no joke in the big cop's expression as he looked toward that sound; it was the look of a man who is totally insane. And Jesus, he was so fucking big.

  "My children of the desert!" the cop said. "The can toi! What music they make!"

  He laughed, looked down at the Baggie of dope in his big hand, shook his head, and laughed even harder. Johnny stood watching him, his assurance that men like him were never murdered suddenly gone.

  "Travels with Harley," the cop said. "Do you know what a stupid name for a book that is? What a stupid concept it is? And to plunder the literary legacy of John Steinbeck . . . a writer whose shoes you aren't fit to lick ... that makes me mad."

  And
before Johnny knew what was happening, a huge silver flare of pain went off in his head. He was aware of staggering backward with his hands clapped over his face and hot blood gushing through his fingers, of flailing his arms, of thinking I'm all right, I'm not going to fall over, I'm all right, and then he was lying on his side in the road, screaming up at the blue socket of the sky. The nose under his fingers no longer felt on straight; it seemed to be lying against his left cheek. He had a deviated septum from all the coke he had done in the eighties, and he remembered his doctor telling him he ought to get that fixed before he ran into a sign or a swinging door or something and it just exploded. Well, it hadn't been a door or a sign, and it hadn't exactly exploded, but it had certainly undergone a swift and radical change. He thought these things in what seemed to be perfectly coherent fashion even while his mouth went on screaming.

  "In fact, it makes me furious," the cop said, and kicked him high up on the left thigh. The pain came in a sheet that sank in like acid and turned the big muscles in his leg to stone. Johnny rolled back and forth, now clutching his leg instead of his nose, scraping his cheek against the asphalt of Highway 50, screaming, gasping, pulling sand down his throat and coughing it harshly back out when he tried to scream again.

  "The truth is it makes me sick with rage," the cop said, and kicked Johnny's ass, high up toward the small of his back. Now the pain was too enormous to be borne; surely he would pass out. But he didn't. He only writhed and crawdaddied on the broken white line, screaming and bleeding from his broken nose and coughing out sand while in the distance coyotes howled at the thickening shadows stretching out from the distant mountains.

  "Get up," the cop said. "On your feet, Lord Jim."

  "I can't," Johnny Marinville sobbed, pulling his legs up to his chest and crossing his arms over his belly, this defensive posture dimly remembered from the '68 Democratic convention in Chicago, and from even before that, from a lecture he had attended in Philadelphia, prior to the first Freedom Rides down into Mississippi. He had meant to go along on one of those--not only was it a great cause, it was the stuff of which great fiction was made--but in the end, something else had come up. Probably his cock, at the sight of a raised skirt.

  "On your feet, you piece of shit. You're in my house now, the house of the wolf and the scorpion, and you better not forget it."

  "I can't, you broke my leg, Jesus Christ you hurt me so bad--"

  "Your leg's not broken and you don't know what being hurt is yet. Now get up."

  "I can't. I really--"

  The gunshot was deafening, the ricochet of the slug off the road a monstrous wasp-whine, and Johnny was on his feet even before he was a hundred per cent sure he wasn't dead. He stood with one foot in the eastbound lane and one in the westbound, drunk-swaying back and forth. The lower half of his face was covered with blood. Sand had stuck in it, making little curls and commas on his lips and cheeks and chin.

  "Hey bigshot, you wet your pants," the cop said.

  Johnny looked down and saw he had. No matter how much you jump and dance, he thought. His left thigh throbbed like an infected tooth. His ass was still mostly numb--it felt like a frozen slab of meat. He supposed he should be grateful, all things considered. If the cop had kicked him a little higher that second time, he might have paralyzed him.

  "You're a sorry excuse for a writer, and you're a sorry excuse for a man," the cop said. He was holding a huge revolver in one hand. He looked down at the Baggie of pot, which he still held in the other, and shook his head disgustedly. "I know that not just by what you say, but by the mouth you say it out of. In fact, if I looked at your loose-lipped and self-indulgent mouth for too long at a stretch, I'd kill you right here. I wouldn't be able to help myself."

  Coyotes howled in the distance, wh-wh-wHoooo, like something that belonged in the soundtrack of an old John Wayne movie.

  "You did enough," Johnny said in a foggy, stuffy voice.

  "Not yet," the cop said, and smiled. "But the nose is a start. It actually improves your looks. Not much, but a little." He opened the back door of his cruiser. As he did, Johnny wondered how long this little comedy had taken. He had absolutely no idea, but not one car or truck had passed while it was going on. Not one. "Get in, bigshot."

  "Where are you taking me?"

  "Where do you think I'd take a self-indulgent pinko-pothead asshole like you? To the old calabozo. Now get in the car."

  Johnny got in the car. As he did, he touched the right breast pocket of his motorcycle jacket.

  The cellular phone was in there.

  5

  He couldn't sit on his bottom, it hurt too much, so he leaned over on his right thigh, one hand cupped loosely over his throbbing nose. It felt like something alive and malevolent, something that was sinking deep, poisonous stingers into his flesh, but for the time being he was able to ignore it. Let the cellular work, he prayed, speaking to a God he had made fun of for most of his creative life, most recently in a story called "Heaven-Sent Weather," which had been published in Harper's magazine to generally favorable comment. Please let the damned phone work, God, and please let Steve have his ears on. Then, realizing all of that was getting the cart quite a bit ahead of the horse, he added a third request: Please give me a chance to use the phone in the first place, okay?

  As if in answer to this part of his prayer, the big cop passed the driver's door of his cruiser without even looking at it and walked to Johnny's motorcycle. He put Johnny's helmet on his own head, then swung one leg over the seat--he was very tall, so it was actually more of a step than a swing--and a moment later the Harley's engine exploded into life. The cop stood astride the seat, unbuckled helmet straps hanging, seeming to dwarf the Harley with his own less lovely bulk. He twisted the throttle four or five times, gunning the motor as if he liked the sound. Then he rocked the Harley upright, kicked back the center-stand, and toed the gearshift down into first. Moving cautiously to start with, reminding Johnny a little of himself when he had taken the bike out of storage and ridden it in traffic for the first time in three years, the cop descended the side of the road. He used the hand-brake and paddled along with his feet, watching intently for hazards and obstacles. Once he was on the desert floor he accelerated, changing rapidly up through the gears and weaving around clumps of sagebrush.

  Run into a gopher-hole, you sadistic fuck, Johnny thought, sniffing gingerly through his plugged and throbbing nose. Hit something hard. Crash and burn.

  "Don't waste your time on him," he mumbled, and used his thumb to pop the snap over the right breast pocket of his motorcycle jacket. He took out the Motorola cellular phone (the cellulars had been Bill Harris's idea, maybe the only good idea his agent had had in the last four years) and flipped it open. He stared down at the display, breath held, now praying for an S and two bars. Come on, God, please, he thought, sweat trickling down his cheeks, blood still leaking out of his swollen, leaning nose. Got to be an S and two bars, anything less and I might as well use this thing for a suppository.

  The phone beeped. What came up in the window on the left side of the display was an S, which stood for "service," and one bar.

  Just one.

  "No, please," he moaned. "Please, don't do this to me, just one more, one more please!"

  He shook the phone in frustration ... and saw he had neglected to pull up the antenna. He did, and a second bar appeared above the first. It flickered, went out, then reappeared, still flickery but there.

  "Yes!" Johnny whispered. " Yesss! He jerked his head up and stared out the window. His sweat-circled eyes peered through a tangle of long gray hair--there was blood in it now--like the eyes of some hunted animal peering out of its hole. The cop had brought the Softail to a stop about three hundred yards out in the scree. He stepped off and then stepped away, letting the bike fall over. The engine died. Even in this situation, Johnny felt a twinge of outrage. The Harley had brought him all the way across the country without a single missed stroke of its sweet American engine, and it hurt to s
ee it treated with such absent disdain.

  "You crazy shit," he whispered. He snuffled back half-congealed blood, spat a jellied wad of it onto the cruiser's paper-littered floor, and looked down at the telephone again. On the row of buttons at the bottom, second from the right, was one which read NAME/MENU. Steve had programmed this function for him just before they had set out. Johnny punched the button, and his agent's first name appeared in the window: BILL. Pushed it again and TERRY appeared. Pushed it again and JACK appeared--Jack Appleton, his editor at FS&G. Dear God, why had he put all these people ahead of Steve Ames? Steve was his lifeline.

  Down on the desert floor three hundred yards away, the insane cop had taken off the helmet and was kicking sand over Johnny's '86 Harley drag. At this distance he looked like a kid pulling a tantrum. That was fine. If he intended to cover the whole thing, Johnny would have plenty of time to make his call... if the phone cooperated, that was. The ROAM light was flashing, and that was a good sign, but the second transmission-bar was still flickering.

  "Come on, come on," Johnny said to the cellular phone in his shaking, blood-grimy hands. "Please, sweetheart, okay? Please." He punched the NAME/MENU button again and STEVE appeared. He dropped his thumb onto the SEND button and squeezed it. Then he held the phone to his ear, bending over even farther to the right and peering out of the bottom of the window as he did so. The cop was still kicking sand over the Harley's engine-block.

  The phone began to ring in Johnny's ear, but he knew he wasn't home free yet. He had tapped into the Roamer network, that was all. He was still a step away from Steve Ames. A long step.

  "Come on, come on, come on ..." A drop of sweat ran into his eye. He used a knuckle to wipe it away.

  The phone stopped ringing. There was a click. "Welcome to the Western Roaming Network!" a cheery robot voice said. "Your call is being routed! Thank you for your patience and have a nice day!"

  "Never mind the seventies shit, just hurry the fuck up," Johnny whispered.

  Silence from the phone. In the desert, the cop stepped back from the bike, looking at it as if trying to decide if he had done enough in the way of camouflage. In the dirty, paper-choked back seat of the cruiser, Johnny Marinville began to cry. He couldn't help it. In a bizarre way it was like wetting his pants again, only upside down. "No," he whispered. "No, not yet, you're not done yet, not with the wind blowing like it is, you better do a little more, please do a little more."