Desperation (6 page)

“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 through 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 hatband. 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 corner 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 face, 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.

That incident hadn't marked the beginning of his decline, but it had marked the point where the decline had become impossible to ignore—he wasn't just having a bad day or a bad year anymore, he was sort of having a bad
life.
The picture of him climbing out of the pool in his sopping white suit, a big drunk's grin on his face, had appeared in
Esquire
's Dubious Achievements issue, and after that had commenced his more-or-less regular appearances in
Spy
magazine.
Spy
was the place, he'd come to believe, where once-legitimate reputations went to die.

At least this afternoon, as he stood facing north and pissing with his shadow stretched out long to his right, these thoughts didn't hurt as much as they sometimes did. As they
always
did in New York, where everything hurt these days. The desert had a way of making Shakespeare's “bubble reputation” seem not only fragile but irrelevant. When you had become a kind of literary Elvis Presley—aging, overweight, and still at the party long after you should have gone home—that wasn't such a bad thing.

He spread his legs even wider, bent slightly at the waist, and let go of his penis so he could massage his lower back. He had been told that doing this helped sustain the flow a little longer, and he had an idea that it did, but he knew he would still have to take a leak again long before he got to Austin, which was the next little Nevada shitsplat on the long road to California. His prostate clearly wasn't what it used to be. When he thought about it these days (which was often), he pictured a bloated, crenellated thing that looked like a radiation-baked giant brain in a fifties drive-in horror movie. He should have it checked, he knew that, and not as an isolated event but as part of a complete soup-to-nuts physical. Of course he should, but hey, it wasn't as if he were
pissing blood
or anything, and besides—

Well, all right. He was scared, that was the besides. There was a lot more to what was wrong with him than just the way his literary reputation had gone slipping through his fingers during the last five years, and quitting the pills and booze hadn't improved things as he'd hoped. In some ways, quitting had made things worse. The trouble with sobriety, Johnny had found, was that you
remembered
all the things you had to be scared of. He was afraid that a doctor might find more than a prostate roughly the size of The Brain from Planet Arous when he stuck his finger up into the literary lion's nether regions; he was afraid that the doctor might find a prostate that was as black as a decayed pumpkin and as cancerous as . . . as Frank Zappa's had been. And even if cancer wasn't lurking there, it might be lurking somewhere else.

The lung, why not? He'd smoked two packs of Camels every day for twenty years, then three packs of Camel Lights for another ten, as if smoking Camel Lights was going to fix everything somehow, spruce up his bronchial tubes, polish his trachea, refurbish his poor sludgecaked alveoli. Well, bullshit. He'd been off the cigarettes for ten years now, the light as well as the heavy, but he still wheezed like an old carthorse until at least noon, and sometimes woke himself up coughing in the middle of the night.

Or the stomach! Yeah, why not there? Soft, pink, trusting, the perfect place for disaster to strike. He had been raised in a family of ravenous meat-eaters where medium-rare meant the cook had breathed hard on the steak and the concept of well-done was unknown; he loved hot sauces and hot peppers; he did not believe in fruits and salads unless one was badly constipated; he'd eaten like that his whole fucking life,
still
ate like that, and would probably
go on
eating like that until they slammed him into a hospital bed and started feeding him all the right things through a plastic tube.

The brain? Possible.
Quite
possible. A tumor, or maybe (here was an
especially
cheerful thought) an unseasonably early case of Alzheimer's.

The pancreas? Well, that one was fast, at least. Express service, no waiting.

Heart attack? Cirrhosis? Stroke?

How likely they all sounded! How logical!

In many interviews he had identified himself as a man outraged by death, but that was pretty much the same old big-balls crap he'd been selling throughout his career. He was
terrified
of death, that was the truth, and as a result of spending his life honing his imagination, he could see it coming from at least four dozen different directions . . . and late at night when he couldn't sleep, he was apt to see it coming from four dozen different directions
at once.
Refusing to see the doctor, to have a checkup and let them peek under the hood, would not cause any of those diseases to pause in their approach or their feeding upon him—if, indeed, the feeding had already begun—but if he stayed away from the doctors and their devilish machines,
he wouldn't have to know.
You didn't have to deal with the monster under the bed or lurking in the corner if you never actually turned on the bedroom lights, that was the thing. And what no doctor in the world seemed to know was that, for men like Johnny Marinville, fearing was sometimes better than finding. Especially when you'd put out the welcome mat for every disease going.

Including AIDS,
he thought, continuing to stare out at the desert. He had tried to be careful—and he didn't get laid as much as he used to, anyway, that was the painful truth—and he knew that for the last eight or ten months he
had
been careful, because the blackouts had stopped with the drinking. But in the year before he'd quit, there had been four or five occasions when he had simply awakened next to some anonymous jane. On each of these occasions he had gotten up and gone immediately into the bathroom to check the toilet. Once there had been a used condom floating in there, so that was probably okay. On the other occasions, zilch. Of course he or his friend (his
gal-pal,
in tabloid-ese) might have flushed it down in the night, but you couldn't know for sure, could you? Not when you'd progressed to the blackout stage. And AIDS—

“That shit gets in there and
waits,
” he said, then winced as a particularly vicious gust of wind drove a fine sheet of alkali dust against his cheek, his neck, and his hanging organ. This latter had quit doing anything useful at least a full minute ago.

Johnny shook it briskly, then slipped it back into his underpants. “Brethern,” he told the distant, shimmering mountains in his earnest revival preacher's voice, “we are told in the Book of Ephesians, chapter three, verse nine, that it matters not how much you jump and dance; the last two drops go in your pants. So it is written and so it is—”

He was turning around, zipping his fly, talking mostly to keep the megrims away (they had been gathering like vultures just lately, those megrims), and now he stopped doing everything at once.

There was a police-cruiser parked behind his motorcycle, its blue flashers turning lazily in the hot desert daylight.