Desperation

“Oh! Oh, Jesus! Gross!”

“What, Mary, what.”

“Didn’t you see it.”

“See what.”

She looked at him, and in the harsh desert sunlight he saw that a lot of the color had gone out of her face, leaving just the marks of sunburn on her cheeks and across her brow, where not even a strong sunblock cream would entirely protect her. She was veiy fair and burned easily.

“On that sign. That speed-limit sign.”

“‘What about it.”

“There was a dead cat on it, Peter! Nailed there or glued there or some damned thing.”

He hit the brake pedal. She grabbed his shoulder at once. “Don’t you even think about going back.”

“But—”

“But what. Did you want to take a picture of it. No way, Josd. If I have to look at that again, I’ll throw up.”

“Was it a white cat.” He could see the back of a sign in the rearview mirror—the speed—limit sign she was talking about, presumably—but that was all. And when they’d passed it, he had been looking off in the other direction, at some birds flying toward the nearest wedge of mountains. Strictly attending to the highway was not something one had to do every second out here; Nevada called its stretch of U.S. 50 “The Loneliest Highway in America,” and in Peter Jackson’s opinion, it lived up to its billing. Of course he was a New York boy, and he supposed he might be suffering a cumulative case of the creeps. Desert agoraphobia, Ballroom Syndrome, something like that.

“No, it was a tiger-stripe,” she said. “What difference does it make.”

“I thought maybe Satanists in the desert,” he said. “This place is supposed to be filled with weirdos, isn’t that what Marielle said.”

“‘Intense’ was the word she used,” Mary said. “‘Cen-tral Nevada’s full of intense people.’ Quote-unquote. Gary said pretty much the same. But since we haven’t seen anybody since we crossed the California state line—”

“Well, in Falion “Pit-stops don’t count,” she said. “Although even there, the people…” She gave him a funny, helpless look that he didn’t see often in her face these days, although it had been common enough in the months following her miscarriage. “Why are they here, Pete. I mean, I can understand Vegas and Reno… even Winnemucca and Wendover…

“The people who come from Utah to gamble there call Wendover Bend Over,” Peter said, grinning. “Gary told me that.”

She ignored him. “But the rest of the state… the people who are here, why do they come and why do they stay. I know I was born and raised in New York, so probably I can’t understand, but—”

“You’re sure that wasn’t a white cat. Or a black one.” He glanced back into the rearview, but at just under sev-enty miles an hour, the speed-limit sign had already faded into a mottled background of sand, mesquite, and dull brown foothills. There was finally another vehicle behind them, though; he could see a hot sunstar reflection prick-ing off its windshield. Maybe a mile back. Maybe two.

“No, tiger-stripe, I told you. Answer my question. Who are the central Nevada taxpayers, and what’s in it for them.”

He shrugged. “There aren’t many taxpayers out here”. Fallon’s the biggest town on Highway 50, and that’s mostly farming. It says in the guidebook that they dammed their lake and made irrigation possible. Canta-loupes is what they grow, mostly. And I think there’s a military base nearby. Fallon was a Pony Express stop, did you know that.”

“I’d leave,” she said. “Just pick up my cantaloupes and go.”

He touched her left breast briefly with his right hand. “That’s a nice set of cantaloupes, ma’am.”

“Thanks. Not just Fallon, either. Any state where you can’t see a house or even a tree, in any direction, and they nail cats to speed-limit signs. I’d leave.”

“Well, it’s a zone-of-perception thing,” he said, speak-ing carefully. Sometimes he couldn’t tell when Mary was serious and when she was just gassing, and this was one of those times. “As someone who was raised in an urban environment, a place like the Great Basin is just outside your zone, that’s all. Mine too, for that matter. The sky alone is enough to freak me out. Ever since we left this morning, I’ve felt it up there, pressing down on me.”

“Me, too. There’s too goddam much of it.”

“Are you sorry we came this way.” He glanced up into the rearview and saw the vehicle behind them was closer now. Not a truck, which was just about all they’d seen since leaving Fallon (and all headed the other way, west), but a car. Really burning up the road, too.

She thought about it, then shook her head. “No. It was good to see Gary and Marielle, and Lake Tahoe—”

“Beautiful, wasn’t it.”

“Incredible. Even this…” Mary looked out the win-dow. “It’s not without beauty, I’m not saying that. And I suppose I’ll remember it the rest of my life. But it’s…

“… creepy,” he finished for her. “If you’re from New York, at least.”

“Damned right,” she said. “Urban Zone of Perception. And even if we’d taken 1-80. it’s all desert.”

“Yep. Tumbling tumbleweeds.” He looked into the mirror again, the lenses of the glasses he wore for driving glinting in the sun. The oncomer was a police-car, doing at least ninety. He squeezed over toward the shoulder until the righthand wheels began to rumble on the hardpan and spume up dust.

“Pete. What are you doing.”

Another look into the mirrors Big chrome grille, coming up fast and reflecting such a savage oblong of sun that he had to squint… but he thought the car was white, which meant it wasn’t the State Police.

“Making myself small,” Peter said. “Wee sleekit cowrin beastie. There’s a cop behind us and he’s in a hurry. Maybe he’s got a line on—”

The police-car blasted by, making the Acura which belonged to Peter’s sister rock in its backwash. It was indeed white, and dusty from the doorhandles down. There was a decal on the side, but the car was gone before Pete caught more than a glimpse of it. DES—something. Destry, maybe. That was a good name for a Nevada town out here in the big lonely.

“—on the guy who nailed the cat to the speed-limit sign,” Peter finished.

“Why’s he going so fast with his flashers off.”

“Who’s there to run them for out here.”

“Well,” she said, giving him that odd-funny look again, “there’s—He opened his mouth to reply, then closed it again. She was right. The cop must have been seeing them for at least as long as they’d been seeing him, maybe longer, so why hadn’t he flipped on his lights and flashers, just to be safe. Of course Peter had known enough to get over on his own, give the cop as much Of the road as he possibly could, but still—The police car’s taillights suddenly came on. Peter hit his own brake without even thinking of it, although he had already slowed to sixty and the cruiser was far enough ahead so there was no chance of a collision. Then the cruiser swerved over into the westbound lane.

“What’s he doing.” Mary asked.

“I don’t know, exactly.”

But of course he knew: he was slowing down. From his cut-em-off-at-the-pass eighty—five or ninety he had dropped to fifty. Frowning, not wanting to catch up and not knowing why, Peter slowed even more himself. The speedometer of Deirdre’s car dropped down toward forty.

“Peter.” Mary sounded alarmed. “Peter, I don’t like this.”

“It’s all right,” he said, but was it. He stared at the cop—car, now tooling slowly up the westbound lane to his left, and wondered. He tried to get a look at the person behind the wheel and couldn’t. The cruiser’s rear window was caked with desert dust.

Its taillights, also caked with dust, flickered briefly as the car slowed even more. Now it was doing barely thirty. A tumbleweed bounced into the road, and the cruiser’s radial tires crushed it under. It came out the back looking—to Peter Jackson like a nestle of broken fingers. All at—once he was frightened, very close to terror, in fact, and he hadn’t the slightest idea why.

Because Nevada ’s full of intense people, Marielle said so and Gary agreed, and this is how intense people act. In—a word, weird.

Of course that was bullshit, this really wasn’t weird, not very weird, anyhow, although—The cop-car taillights flickered some more. Peter pressed his own brake in response, not even thinking about what he was doing for a second, then looking at the speedometer and seeing he was down to twenty-five.

“What does he want, Pete.” By now, that was pretty obvious. “To be behind us again.

“Why.”

“I don’t know.”

“Why didn’t he just pull over on the shoulder and let us go past, if that’s what he wants.”

“I don’t know that, either.”

“What are you going to—”

“Go by, of course.” And then, for no reason at all, he added: “After all, we didn’t nail the goddam cat to the speed-limit sign.”

He pushed down on the accelerator and immediately began to catch up with the dusty cruiser, which was now floating along at no more than twenty.

Mary grabbed the shoulder of his blue workshirt hard enough for him to feel the pressure of her short fingernails. “No, don’t.”

“Mare, there’s not a lot else I can do.”

And the conversation was already obsolete, because he was going by even as he spoke. Deirdre’s Acura drew alongside the dusty white Caprice, then passed it. Peter looked through two pieces of glass and saw very little. A big shape, a man-shape, that was about all. Plus the sense that the driver of the police-car was looking back at him. — Peter glanced down at the decal on the passenger door.

Now he had time to read it: DESPERATION POLICE DEPART-MENT in gold letters below the town seal, which appeared to be a miner and a horseman shaking hands. — Desperation, he thought. Even better than Destry. Much better.

As soon as he was past, the white car swung back into the eastbound lane, speeding up to stay on the Acura’s bumper. They travelled that way for thirty or forty sec-onds (to Peter it felt considerably longer). Then the blue flashers on the Caprice’ s roof came on. Peter felt a sinking in his stomach, but it wasn’t surprise. Not at all.

Mary still had hold of him, and now, as Peter swung onto the shoulder, she began digging in again.

“What are you doing. Peter, what are you doing.”

“Stopping. He’s got his flashers on and he’s pulling me over. — “1 don’t like it,” she said, looking nervously around. There was nothing to look at but desert, foothills, and leagues of blue sky. “What were we doing.”

“Speeding seems logical.” He was looking in the out-side mirror. Above the words CAUTION OBJECTS MAY BE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR, he saw the dusty white driver’s door of the cop-car swing open. A khaki leg swung out. It was prodigious.

As the man it belonged to followed it out, swung the door of his cruiser closed, and settled his Smokey Bear hat on his head (he wouldn’t have been wearing it in the car, Peter supposed; not enough clearance), Mary turned around to look. Her mouth dropped ajar.

“Holy God, he’s the size of a football player!”

“At least,” Peter said. Doing a rough mental calculation that used the roof of the car as a steering-point—about five feet—he guessed that the cop approaching Deirdre’ s Acura had to be at least six-five. And over two hundred and fifty pounds. Probably over three hundred.

Mary let go of him and scooted over against her door as far as she could, away from the approaching giant. On one hip the cop wore a gun as big as the rest of him, but his hands were empty—no clipboard, no citation-book. Peter didn’t like that. He didn’t know what it meant, but he didn’t like it. In his entire career as a driver, which had included four speeding tickets as a teenager and one OUI (after the faculty Christmas party three years ago), he had never been approached by an empty-handed cop, and he most definitely didn’t like it. His heartbeat, already faster than normal, sped up a little more. His heart wasn’t pounding, at least not yet, but he sensed it could pound. That it could pound very easily.

You’re being stupid, you know that, don’t you. he asked himself. It’s speeding, that’s all, simple speeding. The posted limit is a joke and everyone knows it’s a joke, but this guy’s undoubtedly got a certain quota to meet. And when it comes to speeding tickets, out—of-staters are always best. You know that. So… what’s that old Van Halen album title.

Eat Em and Smile.

The cop stopped beside Peter’s window, the buckle of his Sam Browne belt on a level with Peter’s eyes. He did not bend but raised one fist (to Peter it looked the size of a Daisy canned ham) and made cranking gestures.

Peter took off his round rimless glasses, tucked them into his pocket, and rolled his window down. He was very aware of Mary’s quick breathing from the passenger bucket.

She sounded as if she had been jumping rope, or perhaps making love.

The cop did a slow, smooth, deep kneebend, bringing his huge and noncommittal face into the Jacksons’ field of vision. A band of shadow, cast by the stiff brim of his trooper—style hat, lay across his brow. His skin was an uncomfortable-looking pink, and Peter guessed that, for all his size, this man got along with the sun no better than Mary did. His eyes were bright gray, direct but with no emotion in them. None that Peter could read, anyway. He could smell something, though. He thought maybe Old Spice.

The cop gave him only a brief glance, then his gaze was moving around the Acura’s cabin, checking Mary first (American Wife, Caucasian, pretty face, good figure, low mileage, no visible scars), then looking at the cameras and bags and road-litter in the back seat. Not much road-litter yet; they’d only left Oregon three days before, and that included the day and a half they’d spent with Gary and Marielle Soderson, listening to old records and talking about old times.

The cop’s eyes lingered on the pulled-out ashtray. Peter guessed he was looking for roaches, sniffing for the lin-gering aroma of pot or hash, and felt relieved. He hadn’t smoked a joint in nearly fifteen years, had never tried coke, and had pretty much quit drinking after the Christ-mas party OUI. Smelling a little cannabis at the occa-sional rock show was as close to a drug experience as he ever came these days, and Mary had never bothered with the stuff at all—she sometimes referred to herself as a “drug virgin.” There was nothing in the pulled-out ashtray but a couple of balled-up Juicy Fruit wrappers, and no discarded beer-cans or wine bottles in the back seat.

“Officer, I know I was going a little fast—”

“Had the hammer down, did you.” the cop asked pleas-antly. “Gosh, now! Sir, could I see your driver’s license and your registration.”

“Sure.” Peter took his wallet out of his back pocket. “The car’s not mine, though. It’s my sister’s. We’re driving it back to New York for her. From Oregon. She was at Reed. Reed College, in Portland.”

He was babbling, he knew it, but wasn’t sure he could stop it. It was weird how cops could get you running off at the mouth like this, as if you had a dismembered body or a kidnapped child in the trunk. He remembered doing the same thing when the cop bad pulled him over on the Long Island Expressway after the ChnstmaS party, just talking and talking, yattata—yattata—yatta—while all the time the cop said nothing, only went methodically on with his own business, checking first his paperwork and then the con-tents of his little blue plastic Breathalyzer kit.

“Mare. Would you get the registration out of the glove compartment. It’s in a little plastic envelope, along with Dee’s insurance papers.

At first she didn’t move. He could see her out of the corner of his eye, just sitting still, as he opened his wallet and began hunting for his driver’s license. It should have been right there, in one of the windowed compartments in the front of the billfold, big as life, but it wasn’t.

“Mare.” he asked again, a little impatient now, and a little frightened all over again.

What if he’d lost his goddam driver’s license somewhere. Dropped it on the floor at Gary’s, maybe, while he’d been transferring his crap (you always seemed to carry so much more crap in your pockets while you were travelling) from one pair of jeans to the next. He hadn’t, of course, but wouldn t it just be typical if—“Little help, Mare. Get the damned registration” Please.”

“Oh. Sure, okay.”

She bent forward like some old, rusty piece of machinery goosed into life by a sudden jolt of electricity and opened the glove compartment. She began to root through it, lifting some stuff out (a half-finished bag of—Smartfood, a Bonnie Raitt tape that had suffered a miscar nage in Deirdre’s dashboard player, a map of California) so she could get at the stuff behind it. Peter could see small beads of perspiration at her left temple.

Feathers of her short black hair were damp with it, although the air conditioning vent on that side was blowing cool air directly into her face.

“I don’t. — ” she started, and then, with unmistakable relief: “Oh, here it is.”

At the same moment Peter looked in the compartment where he kept business cards and saw his license He couldn’t remember putting it in there—why in the name of God would he have. — but there it was. In the photo graph he looked not like an assistant professor of English at NYU but an unemployed petty laborer (and possible serial killer). Yet it was him, recognizably him, and he felt his spirits lift. They had their papers, God was in his heaven, all was right with the world.

Besides, he thought, handing the cop his license this isn’t Albania, you know. It may not be in our zone of per ception, but it’s definitely not Albania.

“Peter.”

He turned, took the envelope she was holding out and gave her a wink. She tried to smile an acknowledgement, but it didn’t work very well. Outside, a gust of wind threw sand against the side of the car. Tiny grains of it stung Peter’s face and he slitted his eyes against it. Suddenly he wanted to be at least two thousand miles from Nevada, in any direction.

He took Deirdre’s registration and held it out to the cop, but the cop was still looking at his license.

“I see you’re an organ donor,” the cop said, without looking up. “Do you really think that’s wise.”

Peter was nonplussed. “Well, I…

“is that the vehicle registration, sir.” the cop asked crisply. He was now looking at the canary-yellow sheet of paper.

“Yes.”

“Hand it to me, please.”

Peter handed it out the window. Now the cop, still squatting Indian-fashion in the sunlight, had Peter’s driver’s license in one hand and Deirdre’s registration in the other.

He looked back and forth between them for what seemed a very long time. Peter felt light pressure on his thigh and jumped a little before realizing it was Mary’s hand. He took it and felt her fingers wrap around his at once.

“Your sister.” the cop said finally. He looked up at them with his bright gray eyes.

“Yes—”

“Her name is Finney. Yours is Jackson.”

“Deirdre was married for a year, between high school and college,” Mary said. Her voice was firm, pleasant, unafraid. Peter would have believed it completely if not for the clutch of her fingers. “She kept her husband’s name. That’s all it is.”

“A year, hmmm. Between high school and college. Married. Tak!”

His head remained down over the documents. Peter could see the peak of his Smokey Bear hat ticking back and forth as he fell to examining them again.

Peter’s sense of relief was slipping away.

“Between high school and college,” the cop repeated, head down, big face hidden, and in his head Peter heard him say: I see you’re an organ donor. Do you really think that’s wise. Tak!

The cop looked up. “Would you step out of the car, please, Mr. Jackson.”

Mary’s fingers bore down, her nails biting into the back of Peter’s hand, but the burning sensation was far away. Suddenly his balls and the pit of his stomach were crawling with dismay, and he felt like a child again, a confused child who only knows for sure that he has done something bad.

“What—” he began.

The cop from the Desperation cruiser stood. It was like watching a freight elevator go up.

The head disappeared, then the open-collared shirt with its gleaming badge, then the diagonal strap of the Sam Browne belt. Then Peter was looking at the heavy beltbuckle again, the gun, and the khaki fold of cloth over the man’s fly.

This time what came from above the top of the window wasn’t a question. “Get out of the car, Mr. Jackson.”

Peter pulled the handle and the cop stood back so he could swing the door open. The cop’s head was cut off by the roof of the Acura. Mary squeezed Peter’s hand more violently than ever and Peter turned back to look at her. The sunburned places on her cheeks and brow were even clearer now, because her face had gone almost ashy. Her eyes were very wide.

“Don ‘t get out of the car,” she mouthed.

I have to, he mouthed back, and swung a leg out Onto the asphalt of U.S. 50. For a moment Mary clung to him, her hand entwined in his, and then Peter pulled loose and got the rest of the way out, standing on legs that felt queerly distant. The cop was looking down at him. Six—seven, Peter thought. Got to be. And he suddenly saw a quick sequence of events, like a fiimclip run at super speed: the huge cop drawing his gun and pulling the trigger, spraying Peter Jackson’s educated brains across the roof of the Acura in a slimy fan, then yanking Mary out of the car, driving her face-first into the lid of the closed trunk, bending her over, then raping her right out here beside the highway in the searing desert sunshine, his Smokey Bear hat still planted squarely on his head, screaming You want a donated organ, lady. Here you go! Here you go! as he rocked and thrust.

“What’s this about, Officer.” Peter asked, his mouth and throat suddenly dry. “I think I have a right to know.”

“Step around to the rear of the car, Mr. Jackson.”

The cop turned and walked toward the back of the Acura without bothering to see if Peter was going to obey. Peter did obey, walking on legs that still felt as if—they were relaying their sensory input by some form of telecommunications.

The cop stopped beside the trunk. When Peter joined him, he pointed with one big finger.

Peter followed it and saw there was no license plate on the back of Deirdre’ s car—just a marginally cleaner rectangle where it had been.

“Ah, shit!” Peter said, and his irritation and dismay were real enough, but so was the relief beneath them. All this had had a point after all. Thank God. He turned toward the front of the car and wasn’t exactly surprised to see the driver’s door was now closed-.

Mary had closed it. He had been so far into this… event. . occurrence this whatever it was… that he hadn’t even heard the thump.

“Mare! Hey, Mare!”

She poked her sunburned, strained face out of his window and looked back at him.

“Our damned license plate fell off!” he called, almost laughing.

“What.”

“No, it didn’t,” the Desperation cop said. He squatted again—that calm, slow, lithe movement—and reached—beneath the bumper. He fumbled there, on the other side of the place where the plate went, for a moment or two, his gray eyes gazing off toward the horizon. Pete was. invaded by an eerie sense of familiarity: he and his wife had been pulled over by the Marlboro Man.

“Ah!” the cop said. He stood up again. The hand he had—been investigating with was clenched into a loose fist. He held it out to Peter and opened it. Lying on his palm (and looking very small in that vast pinkness) was a road-dirty piece of screw. it was bright in only one place, where it had been sheared off.

Peter looked at it. then up at the cop. “I don’t get it.”

“Did you stop in Fallon.”

“No—”

There was a creak as Mary’s door opened, a clunk as she shut it behind her, then the scuff of her sneakers on the sandy shoulder as she walked toward the back of the car.

“Sure we did,” she said. She looked at the fragment of metal in the big hand (Deirdre’s registration and Peter’s driver’s license were still in the cop’s other one), then up at the cop’s face. She didn’t seem scared now—not as scared, anyway—and Peter was glad. He was already calling himself nine kinds of paranoid idiot, but you had to admit that this particular close encounter of the cop kind had had its (do you really think that’s wise) peculiar aspects.

“Pit-stop, Peter, don’t you remember. We didn’t need gas, you said we could do that in Ely, but we got sodas so we wouldn’t feel guilty about asking to use the rest-rooms—”

She looked at the cop and tried on a smile. She had to crane back to see his face. To Peter she looked like a little girl trying to coax a smile out of Daddy after Daddy had gotten home from a bad day at the office. “The restrooms were very clean.”

He nodded. “Was that Fill More Fast or Berk’s Conoco you stopped at.”

She glanced uncertainly at Peter. He turned his hands up at shoulder level. “1 don’t remember,” he said. “Hell, I barely remember stopping.”

The cop tossed the useless chunk of screw back over his shoulder and into the desert, where it would lie undis-turbed for a million years, unless it caught some inquisi-tive bird’s eye. “But I bet you remember the kids hanging around outside. Older kids, mostly.

One or two maybe too old to actually be kids at all. The younger ones with skate-boards or on Rollerblades.”

Peter nodded. He thought of Mary asking him why the people were here—why they came and why they stayed.

“That was the Fill More Fast.” Peter looked to see if the cop was wearing a nametag on one of his shirt pockets, but he wasn’t. So for now, at least, he’d have to stay just the cop.

The one who looked like the Marlboro Man in the magazine ads. “Alfie Berk won’t have em around any-more. Kicked em the hell out.

They’re a dastardly bunch.”

Mary cocked her head at that, and for a moment Peter could see the ghost of a smile at the corners of her mouth.

“Are they a gang.” Peter asked. He still didn’t see where this was going.

“Close as you’d get in a place as small as Fallon,” the cop said. He raised Peter’s license to his face, looked at it, looked at Peter, lowered it again. But he did not offer to give it back. “Dropouts, for the most part. And one of their hobbies is kifing out-of-state license plates. It’s like a dare thing. I imagine they got yours while you were in buying your cold drinks or using the facilities.”

“You know this and they still do it.” Mary asked. “Fallon’s not my town. I rarely go there. Their ways are not my ways.”

“What should we do about the missing plate.” Peter—asked. “I mean, this is a mess. The car’s registered in Oregon, but my sister has gone back to New York to live. She hated Reed—”

“Did she.” the cop asked. “Gosh, now!”

Peter could feel Mary’s eyes shift to him, probably wanting him to share her moment of amusement, but that didn’t seem like a good idea to him. Not at all.

“She said going to school there was like trying to go to school in the middle of a Grateful Dead concert,” he said. “Anyway, she flew back to New York. My wife and I thought it would be fun to go out and get the car for her, bring it back to New York. Deirdre packed a bunch of her—stuff in the trunk… clothes, niostlv…

He was babbling again, and he made himself stop. “So what do I do. We can’t very well drive all the way across the country with no license plate on the back of the car, can we.”

The cop walked toward the front of the Acura, moving very deliberately. He still had Peter’s license and Deir-dre’s canary-yellow registration slip in one hand. His Sam Browne belt creaked. When he reached the front of the car he put his hands behind his back and stood frowning down at something. To Peter he looked like an interested patron in an art gallery. Dastardly, he’d said. A dastardly bunch. Peter didn’t think he had ever actually heard that word used in conversation. — The cop walked back toward them. Mary moved next to Peter, but her fright seemed gone. She was looking at the big — man with interest, that was all.

“The front plate’s okay,” the cop said. “Put that one on the back. You won’t have any problem getting to New York on that basis.”

“Oh,” Peter said. “Okay. Good idea.”

“Do you have a wrench and screwdriver. I think all my tools ’re back sitting on a bench in the town garage.” The cop grinned. It lit his whole face, informed his eyes, turned-him into a different man. “Oh. These’re yours.” He held out the license and registration.

“There’s a little toolkit in the trunk, I think,” Mary said. She sounded giddy, and that was how Peter felt. Pure relief, he supposed. “I saw it while I was putting in my makeup case.

Between the spare tire and the side.”

“Officer, I want to thank you,” Peter said.

The big cop nodded. He wasn’t looking at Peter, though; his gray eyes were apparently fixed on the moun-tains off to his left. “Just doing my job.”

Peter walked to the driver’s door of the car, wondering why he and Mary had been so afraid in the first place.

That’s nonsense, he told himself as he pulled the keys out of the Ignition switch, They were on a smile-face keychain, which was pretty much par for the course—Deirdre’s course, anyway. Mr. Smiley-Smile (her name for him) was his sister’s trademark. She put happy yellow ones on the flaps of most of her letters, the occasional green one with a downturned mouth and a blah tongue stuck out if she happened to be having a bad day. 1 wasn’t afraid, not really. Neither was Mary.

Boink, a lie. He had been afraid, and Mary… well, Mary had been damned close to terrified.

Okay—maybe we were a little freaked, he thought, picking out the trunk key as he walked to the back of the car again. So sue us. The sight of Mary standing next to the big cop was like some sort of optical illusion; the top of her head barely came up to the bottom of his ribcage.

Peter opened the trunk. On the left, neatly packed (and covered with Hefty bags to keep the road dust off them), were Deirdre’s clothes. In the center, Mary’s makeup case and their two suitcases—his n hers—were wedged in between the green bundles and the spare tire. Although “tire” was much too grand a word for it, Peter thought. It was one of those blow-up doughnuts, good for a run to the nearest service station. If you were lucky.

He looked between the doughnut and the trunk’s side-wall. There was nothing there.

“Mare, I don’t see—”

“There.” She pointed. “That gray thing. That’s it. it’s worked its way in back of the spare, that’s all.”

He could have snaked his arm into the gap, but it seemed easier just to lift the uninflated rubber doughnut out of the way. He was leaning it against the back bumper when he heard Mary’s sudden intake of breath. It sounded as if she had been pinched or poked.

“Oh hey,” the big cop said mildly. “What’s this.” Mary and the cop were looking into the trunk. The cop looked interested and slightly bemused. Mary’s eyes were bulging, horrified. Her lips were trembling. Peter turned, looking into the trunk again, following their gaze. There was something in the spare-tire well. It had been under the doughnut.

For a moment he either didn’t know what it—was or didn’t want to know what it was, and then that crawling sensation started in his lower belly again. This time there was also a sense of his sphincter’s not loos-ening but dropping, as if the muscles which ordinarily held it up where it belonged had dozed off. He became aware that he was squeezing his buttocks together, but even that was far away, in another time zone. He felt an—all-too-brief certainty that this was a dream, had to be.

The big cop gave him a look, those bright gray eyes—still peculiarly empty, then reached into the spare-tire—well and brought out a Baggie, a big one, a gallon-size, and stuffed full of greenish-brown herbal matter. The flap had been sealed with strapping tape. Plastered on the front—was a round yellow sticker. Mr. Smiley-Smile. The perfect emblem for potheads like his sister, whose adven-tures in life could have been titled Through Darkest America with Bong and Roach-Clip. She had gotten preg-nant while storied, had undoubtedly decided to marry Roger Finney while stoned, and Peter knew for a fact that she had left Reed (carrying a one-point-forget-it grade average) because there was too much dope floating around and she just couldn’t say no to it. She’d been up front about that part, at least, and he had actually looked—through the Acura for stashes—it would be stuff she’d forgotten about rather than stuff she’d actually hidden, most likely—before they left Portland. He’d looked under the Hefty bags her clothes were stored in, and Mary had thumbed through the clothes themselves (neither admitting out loud what they were looking for, both knowing), but neither of them had thought to look under—the doughnut.

The goddam doughnut.

The cop squeezed the Baggie with one oversized thumb as if it were a tomato. He reached into his pocket and produced a Swiss Army knife. He plucked out the smallest—blade.

“Officer,” Peter said in a weak voice. “Officer, I don’t know how that—”

“Shhh,” the big cop said, and cut a tiny slit in the Baggie.

Peter felt Mary’s hand tugging at his sleeve. He took her hand, this time folding his fingers over hers. All at once he could see Deirdre’s pale, pretty face floating just behind his eyes. Her blond hair, which still fell to her shoulders in natural Stevie Nicks ringlets.

Her eyes, which were always a bit confused.

You stupid little bitch, he thought. You ought to be very grateful that you’re not where I can get my hands on you right now.

“Officer—” Mary tried.

The cop raised his hand to her, palm out, then put the tiny slit in the Baggie against his nose and sniffed. His — eyes drifted closed. After a moment he opened them again—and lowered the Baggie. He held out his other band, palm up. “Give me your keys, sir,” he said.

“Officer, I can explain this—”

“Give me your keys.”

“If you just—”

“Are you deaf. Give me your keys.”

He only raised his voice a little, but it was enough to start Mary crying. Feeling like someone who is having an out-of-body experience, Peter dropped Deirdre’s car-keys i—tto the cop’s waiting hand and then put his arm around his wife’s shaking shoulders.

“‘Praid you folks axe going to have to come with me,” the cop said. His eyes went from Peter to Mary and then back to Peter again. When they did, Peter realized what it was about them that bothered him. They were bright, like the minutes before sunrise on a foggy morning, but they were also dead, somehow.

“Please,” Mary said, her voice wet. “It’s a mistake. His sister—”

“Get in the car,” the cop said, indicating his cruiser. The flashers were still pulsing on the roof, bright even in the bright desert daylight. “Right now, please, Mr. and Mrs.

Jackson.”

The rear seat was extremely cramped (of course it would be, Peter thought distractedly, a man that big would have the front seat back as far as it would go). There were stacks of paper in the footwell behind the driver’s seat (the back of that seat was actually warped from the cop’s weight) and more on the back deck. Peter picked one up—it had a dried, puckered coffee-ring on it—and saw it was a DARE flyer. At the top was a picture of a kid sitting in a doorway. There was a dazed, vacant expression on his face (he looked the way Peter felt right now, in fact), and the coffee-ring circled his head like a halo. USERS ARE LOSERS, the folder said.

There was mesh between the front of the car and the back, and no handles or window—cranks on the doors. Peter had begun to feel like a character in a movie (the one which came most persistently to mind was Midnight Express), and these details only added to that sensation. His best judgement was that he had talked too much about too many things already, and it would be well for him and Mary to stay quiet, at least until they got to wherever Officer Friendly meant to take them. It was probably good advice, but it was hard advice to follow. Peter found him-self with a powerful urge to tell Officer Friendly that a terrible mistake had been made here—he was an assistant professor of English, his specialty was postwar American fiction, he had recently published a scholarly article called “James Dickey and the New Southern Reality” (a piece which had generated a great deal of controversy in certain ivied academic bowers), and, furthermore, that he hadn’t smoked dope in years. He wanted to tell the cop that he might be a little bit overeducated by central Nevada standards, but was still, basically, one of the good guys.

He looked at Mary. Her eyes were full of tears, and he was suddenly ashamed of the way he had been thinking—all me, me, me and I, I, I. His wife was in this with him; he’d do well to remember that. “Pete, I’m so scared,” she said in a whisper that was almost a moan.

He leaned forward and kissed her cheek. The skin was as cool as clay beneath his lips.

“It’ll be all right. We’ll straighten this out.”

“Word of honor.”

“‘Word of honor.

After putting them into the back seat of the cruiser, the cop had returned to the Acura. He had been looking into the trunk for at least two minutes now. Not searching it, not even moving anything around, just staring in with his hands clasped behind his back, as if mesmerized. Now he jerked like a man waking suddenly from a nap, slammed the Acura’ s trunk shut and walked back to the Caprice. It canted to the left when he got in, and from the springs beneath there came a tired but somehow resigned groan. The back seat bulged a little fuither, and Peter grimaced at the sudden pressure on his knees.

Mary should have taken this side, he thought, but it was too late now. Too late for a lot of things, actually.

The cruiser’s engine was running. The cop dropped the transmission into gear and pulled back onto the road. Mary turned to watch the Acura drop behind them. When she faced front again, Peter saw that the tears which had been standing in her eyes had spilled down her cheeks.

“Please listen to me,” she said, speaking to the cropped blond hair on the back of that enormous skull. The cop had laid his Smokey Bear hat aside again, and to Peter the top of his head looked to be no more than a quarter of an inch — from the Caprice’s roof. “Please, okay. Try to understand. That isn’t our car. You have to understand that much at least, I know you do, because you saw the registration. It’s my sister-in-law’s. She’s a pothead. Half her brain-cells—”

“Mare—” Peter laid a hand on her arm. She shook it off.

“No! I’m not going to spend the rest of the day answer-ing questions in some dipshit police station, maybe in a jail cell, because your sister’s selfish and forgetful and and… all fucked up!”

Peter sat back—his knees were still being pinched pretty severely but he thought he could live with it—and looked out the dust-coated side window. They were a mile or two east of the Acura now, and he could see something up ahead, pulled over on the shoulder of the westbound lane. Some sort of vehicle. Big. A truck, maybe.

Mary had switched her gaze from the back of the cop’s head to the rearview minor, trying to make eye contact with him. “Half of Deirdre’s brain-cells are fried and the other half are on permanent vacation in the Emerald City. The technical term is ‘burnout,’ and I’m sure you ye seen people like her, Officer, even out here. What you found under the spare tire probably is dope, you’re probably right about that, but not our dope! Can’t you see that.”

The thing up ahead, off the road with its tinted wind-shield pointed in the direction of Fallon and Carson City and Lake Tahoe, wasn’t a truck after all; it was an RV. Not one of the real dinosaurs, but still pretty big. Cream—colored, with a dark green stripe running along the side. The words FOUR HAPPY WANDERERS were printed in the same dark green on the RV’s blunt nose. The vehicle was road-dusty and canted over in an awkward, unnatu-ral way.

As they neared it, Peter saw an odd thing: all the tires in his view appeared to be flat. He thought maybe the double set of back tires on the passenger side was flat, — too, although he only caught the briefest glimpse of them. That many flat shoes would account for the land-cruisers funny, canted look, but how did you get that many fla—shoes all at once.

Nails in the road. A strew of glass.

He looked at Mary. but Mary was still looking passion ately up into the rearview minor.

“If we’d put that bag o dope under the tire,” she was saying, “if it was ours, then why in God’s name would Peter have taken the spare out so you could see it. I mean, he could have reached around the spare and gotten the toolkit, it would have been a little awkward but there was room.”

They went past the RV. The side door was closed but unlatched. The steps were down.

There was a doll lying in the dirt at the foot of them. The dress it was wearing flut tered in the wind.

Peter’s eyes closed. He didn’t know for sure if he had closed them or if they had closed on their own. Didn t much care. All he knew was that Officer Friendly had blown by the disabled RV as if he hadn’t even seen it.

Or as if he already knew all about it.

Words from an old song, floating in his head: Somethin happenin here… what it is ain’t exactly clear…

“Do we impress you as stupid people.” Mary was ask ing as the disabled RV began to dwindle behind them—to dwindle as Deirdre’s Acura had done. “Or stoned. Do you think we’re—”

“Shut up,” the cop said. He spoke softly, but there was no way to miss the venom in his voice.

Mary had been sitting forward with her fingers curled into the mesh between the front and back seats. Now her hands dropped away from it, and she turned her shocked face toward Peter. She was a faculty wife, she was a poet who had published in over twenty magazines since her first tentative submissions eight years ago, she went to a women’s discussion group twice a week, she had been seriously considering piercing her nose.

Peter wondered when the last time was she had been told to shut up. He wondered if anyone had ever told her to shut up.

“What.” she asked, perhaps trying to sound aggressive, even threatening, and only sounding bewildered. “What did you tell me.”

“I’m arresting you and your husband on a charge of possession of marijuana with intent to sell,” the cop said His voice was uninflected, robotic. Now staring forward Peter saw there was a little plastic bear stuck to the dash board, beside the compass and next to what was probably an LED readout for the radar speed-gun. The bear was small, the size of a gumball machine prize. His neck was on a spring, and his empty painted eyes stared back at Peter.

This is a nightmare, he thought, knowing it wasn’t. It’s got to be a nightmare. I know it feels real, but it’s got to be.

“You can’t be serious,” Mary said, but her voice was tiny and shocked. The voice of someone who knew better. Her eyes were filling up with tears again. “Surely you can’t be.”

“You have the right to remain silent,” the big cop said in his robot’s voice. “If you do not choose to remain silent, anything you say may be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. I’m going to kill you. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you. Do you understand your rights as I have explained them to you.”

She was looking at Peter, her eyes huge and horrified, asking him without speaking if he had heard what the cop had mixed in with the rest of it, that robotic voice never varying.

Peter nodded. He had heard, all right. He put a hand into his crotch, sure he would feel dampness there, but he hadn’t wet himself. Not yet, anyway. He put an arm around Mary and could feel her trembling. He kept thinking of the RV back there. Door ajar, dollbaby lying face-down in the dirt, too many flat tires. And then there was the dead cat Mary had seen nailed to the speed—limit sign.

“Do you understand your rights.”

Act normally. I don’t think he has the slightest idea what he said, so act normally.

But what was normal when you were in the back seat of a police-cruiser driven by a man who was clearly as mad as a hatter, a man who had just said he was going to kill you.

“Do you understand your rights.” the robot voice asked him.

Peter opened his mouth. Nothing came out but a croak. The cop turned his head then. His face, pinkish with sun when he had stopped them, had gone pale. His eyes were very large, seeming to bulge out of his face like marbles. He had bitten his lip, like a man trying to sup-press some monstrous rage, and blood ran down his chin in a thin stream.

“Do you understand your rights.” the cop screamed at them, head turned, bulleting blind down the deserted two—lane at better than seventy miles an hour. “Do you under—stand your fucking rights or not. Do you or not. Do you or not. Do you or not. Answer me, you smart New York Jew!”

“I do!” Peter cried. “We both do, just watch the road, for Christ’s sake watch where you’re going!”

The cop continued staring back at them through the mesh, face pale, blood dripping down from his lower lip. The Caprice, which had begun to veer to the left, almost all the way across the westbound lane, now slid back the other way.

“Don’t worry about me,” the cop said. His voice was mild again. “Gosh, no. I’ve got eyes in the back of my head. In fact, I’ve got eyes just about everywhere. You’d do well to remember that.”

He turned back suddenly, facing front again, and dropped the cruiser’s speed to an easygoing fifty-five. The seat settled back against Peter’s knees with painful weight, pinning him.

He took Mary’s hands in both of his own. She pressed her face against his chest, and he could feel the sobs she was trying to suppress. They shook through her like wind. He looked over her shoulder, through the mesh. On the dashboard, the bear’s head nodded and bobbed on its spring.

“I see holes like eyes,” the cop said. “My mind is full of them.” He said nothing else until they got to town.

The next ten minutes were very slow ones for Peter Jackson. The cop’s weight against his pinned knees seemed to increase with each circuit of his wristwatch’s second hand, and his lower legs were soon numb. His feet were dead asleep, and he wasn’t sure that he would be able to walk on them if this ride ever ended. His bladder throbbed. His head ached. He understood that he and Mary were in the worst trouble of their lives, but he was unable to comprehend this in any real and meaningful way. Every time he neared comprehension, there was a short circuit in his head. They were on their way back to New York. They were expected. Someone was water-ing their plants. This couldn’t be happening, absolutely could not.

Mary nudged him and pointed out her window. Here was a sign, reading simply DESPERATION. Under the word was an arrow pointing to the right.

The cop slowed, but not much, before making the right. The car started to tip and Peter saw Mary drawing in breath. She was going to scream. He put a hand over her mouth to stop her and whispered in her ear, “He’s got it, I’m pretty sure he does, we’re not going to roll.” But he wasn’t sure until he felt the cruiser’s rear end first slide, then catch hold.

A moment later they were racing south along narrow patched blacktop with no centerline.

Amile or so farther on, they passed a sign which read DESPERATION’s CHURCH & CIVIC ORGANIZATIONS WELCOME YOU! The words CHURCH & CIVIC ORGANIZATIONS were readable, although they had been coated with yellow spray-paint. Above them, in the same paint, the words DEAD DOGS had been added in ragged caps. The churches and civic organizations were listed beneath, but Peter didn’t bother to read them. A German Shepherd had been hanged from the sign.

Its rear paws tick-tocked back and forth an inch or two above a patch of ground that was dark and muddy with its blood.’ Mary’s hands were clamped on his like a vise. He wel-comed their pressure. He leaned toward her again, into the sweet smell of her perfume and the sour smell of her tern—fled sweat, leaned toward her until his lips were pressed against the cup of her ear. “Don’t say a word, don’t make a sound,” he murmured. “Nod your head if you under-stand me.”

She nodded against his lips, and Peter straightened up again.

They passed a trailer park behind a stake fence. Most of the trailers were small and looked as if they had seen better days—around the time Cheers first went on the air, perhaps. Dispirited-looking laundry flapped between a few of them in the hot desert wind. In front of one was a sign which read: I’M A GUN-TOTIN’ SNAPPLE-DRINKIN”

BIBLE-READIN’ CLINTON-BASHIN’ SON OF A BITCH!

NEVER MIND THE DOG, BEWARE OF THE OWNER!

Mounted on an old Airstream which stood near the road was a large black satellite dish.

On the side of it was another sign, white-painted metal down which streaks of rust had run like ancient bloody tears:

THIS TELACOMMUNICATIONS

PROPERTY RATTLESNAKE TRAILER PARK

NO TREESPASSING! POLICE PATROLED!

Beyond the Rattlesnake Trailer Park was a long Quonset hut with rusty, corrugated sides and roof. The sign out front read DESPERATION MINING CORP. To one side was a cracked asphalt parking lot with a dozen cars and pickups in it. A moment later they passed the Desert Rose Cafe.

Then they were in the town proper. Desperation, Nevada, consisted of two streets that crossed at right angles (a blinker-light, currently flashing yellow on all four sides, hung over the intersection) and two blocks of business buildings. Most seemed to have false fronts. There was an Owl’s Club casino and cafe, a grocery, a laundrymat, a bar with a sign in the window reading ENJOY OUR SLOTSPITALITY, hardware and feed stores, a movie theater called The American West, a few others. None of the businesses looked as if they were booming, and the theater had the air of a place that has been closed a long time. A single crooked R hung from its dirty, bashed-in marquee.

Going the other way, east and west, were some frame houses and more trailers. Nothing seemed to be in motion except for the cruiser and one tumbleweed, which moved down Main in large, lazy lopes.

I’d get off the streets, too, if I saw this guy coming, Peter thought. You’re goddamned tooting I would.

Beyond the town was an enormous curving bulwark with an improved dirt road at least four lanes wide run-ning up to the top in a pair of wide switchbacks. The rest of this curved rampart, which had to be at least three hun-dred feet high, was crisscrossed by deep runoff trenches.

To Peter they looked like wrinkles in old skin. At the foot of the crater (he assumed it was a crater, the result of some sort of mining operation), trucks that looked like toys compared to the soaring, wrinkled wall behind them were clustered together by a long, corrugated building with a conveyor belt running out of each end.

Their host spoke up for the first time since telling them his mind was full of holes, or whatever it was he’d said.

“Rattlesnake Number Two. Sometimes known as the China Pit.” He sounded like a tourguide who still enjoys his job. “Old Number Two was opened in 1951, and from ’62 or so right through the seventies, it was the biggest open-pit copper mine in the United States, maybe in the world. Then it played out. They opened it up again year before last.

They got some new technology that makes even the tailings valuable. Science, huh.

“Gosh!”

But there was nothing moving up there now, not that Peter could see, although it was a weekday. Just the huddle of trucks by what was probably some kind of sorting-mill, and another truck—this one a pickup—parked off to the side of the gravel highway leading to the summit. The conveyors at the ends of the long metal building were stopped.

The cop drove through the center of town, and as they passed beneath the blinker, Mary squeezed Peter’s hands twice in rapid succession. He followed her gaze and saw three bikes in the middle of the street which crossed Main. They were about a block and a half down and had been set on their seats in a row, with their wheels sticking up. The wheels were turning like windmill blades in the gusty alr.

She turned to look at him, her wet eyes wider than ever.

Peter squeezed her hands again and made a “Shhh” sound.

The cop signalled a left turn—pretty funny, under the circumstances—and swung into a small, recently paved parking lot bordered on three sides by brick walls. Bright white lines were spray-painted on the smooth and crack—less asphalt. On the wall at the rear of the lot was a sign which read: MUNICIPAL EMPLOYEES AND MUNICIPAL BUSINESS ONLY PLEASE RESPECT THIS PARKING LOT.

Only in Nevada would someone ask you to respect a parking lot, Peter thought. In New York the sign would probably read UNAUTHORIZED VEHICLES WILL BE STOLEN AND THEIR OWNERS EATEN.

There were four or five cars in the lot. One, a rusty old Ford Estate Wagon, was marked FIRE CHIEF. There was another police-car, in better shape than the Fire Chiefs car but not as new as the one their captor was driving. There was a single handicapped space in the lot Officer Friendly parked in it. He turned off the engine and then just sat there for a moment or two, head lowered, fin gers tapping restlessly at the steering wheel, humming under his breath. To Peter it sounded like “Last Train to Clarksville.”

“Don’t kill us,” Mary said suddenly in a trembling, teary voice. “We’ll do whatever you want, just please don’t kill us.”

“Shut your quacking Jew mouth,” the cop replied. He didn’t raise his head, and he went on tapping at the wheel with the tips of his sausage-sized fingers.

“We’re not Jews,” Peter heard himself saying. His voice sounded not afraid but querulous, angry. “We’re, well, Presbyterians, I guess. What’s this Jew thing.”

Mary looked at her husband, horrified, then back through the mesh to see how the cop was taking it. At first he did nothing, only sat with his head down and his fin gem tapping. Then he grabbed his hat and got out of the car. Peter bent down a little so he could watch the cop settle the hat on his head. The cop’s shadow was still squat, but it was no longer puddled around his feet. Peter glanced at his watch and saw it was a few minutes shy of two-thirty. Less than an hour ago, the biggest question he and his wife had had was what their accommodations for the night would be like. His only worry had been hls strong suspicion that he was out of Rolaids.

The cop bent and opened the left rear door. “Please get out of the vehicle, folks,” he said.

They slid out, Peter first. They stood in the hot light looking uncertainly up at the man in the khaki uniform and the Sam Browne belt and the peaked trooper style hat.

“We’re going to walk around to the front of the Munici pal Building,” the cop said.

“That’ll be a left as you reach the sidewalk. And you look like Jews to me. The both of you. You have those big noses which connote the Jewish aspect.”

“Officer—” Mary began.

“No,” he said. “Walk. Make your left. Don’t try my patience.”

They walked. Their footfalls on the fresh black tar seemed very loud. Peter kept thinking of the little plastic bear on the dashboard of the cruiser. Its jiggling head and painted eyes. Who had given it to the cop. A favorite niece. A daughter. Officer Friendly wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, Peter had noticed that while watching the man’s fingers tap against the steering wheel, but that didn’t mean he had never been married. And the idea that a woman married to this man might at some point seek a divorce did not strike Peter as in the least bit odd.

From somewhere above him came a monotonous reek—reek-reek sound. He looked down the street and saw a weathervane turning rapidly on the roof of the bar, Bud’s Suds. It was a leprechaun with a pot of gold under one arm and a knowing grin on his spinning face. It was the weathervane making the sound.

“To your left, Dumbo,” the cop said, sounding not impatient but resigned. “Do you know which way is your left. Don’t they teach hayfoot and strawfoot to you New York Homo Presbyterians.”

Peter turned left. He and Mary were still walking hip to hip, still holding hands. They came to a set of three stone steps leading up to modern tinted-glass double doors. The building itself was much less modern. A white-painted sign hung on faded brick proclaimed it to be the DESPERA-TION MUNICIPAL BUILDING. Below, on the doors, were listed the offices and services to be found within: Mayor, School Committee, Fire, Police, Sanitation, Welfare Services, Department of Mines and Assay. At the bottom of the righthand door was printed: MSHA FRIDAYS AT 1 PM AND BY APPOINTMENT.

The cop stopped at the foot of the steps and looked at the Jacksons curiously. Although it was brutally hot out here, probably somewhere in the upper nineties, he did not appear to be sweating at all. From behind them, monotonous in the silence, came the reek-reek—reek of the weathervane.

“You’re Peter,” he said.

“Yes, Peter Jackson.” He wet his lips.

The cop shifted his eyes. “And you’re Mary.”

“That’s right.”

“So where’s Paul.” the cop asked, looking at them pleasantly while the rusty leprechaun squeaked and spun on the roof of the bar behind them.

“What.” Peter asked. “I don’t understand.”

“How can you sing ‘Five Hundred Miles’ or ‘Leavin on a Jet Plane’ without Paul.” the cop asked, and opened the righthand door. Machine-cooled air puffed out. Peter felt it on his face and had time to register how nice it was nice and cool; then Mary screamed. Her eyes had adjusted to the gloom inside the building faster than his own, but he saw it a moment later. There was a girl of about SiX sprawled at the foot of the stairs, half—propped against the last four risers. One hand was thrown back over her head It lay palm—up on the stairs. Her straw-colored hair had been tied in a couple of tails. Her eyes were wide open and her head was unnaturally cocked to one side. There was no question in Peter’s mind about whom the dolly lying at the foot of the RV’s steps had belonged to.

FOUR HAPPY WANDERERS, it had said on the front of the RV, but that was clearly out of date in these modern times. There was no question in his mind about that, either.

“Gosh!” the cop said genially. “Forgot all about her1 But you can never remember everything, can you. No matter how hard you try!”

Mary screamed again, her fingers folded down against her palms and her hands against her mouth, and tried to bolt back down the steps.

“No you don’t, what a bad idea,” the cop said. He caught her by the shoulder and shoved her through the door, which he was holding open. She reeled across the small lobby, revolving her arms in a frantic effort to keep her balance, not wanting to fall on top of the dead child in the jeans and the MotoKops 2200 shirt.

Peter started in toward his wife and the cop caught him with both hands, now using his butt to keep the righthand door open. He slung an arm around Peter’s shoulders. His face looked open and friendly. Most of all, best of all, it looked sane—as if his good angels had won out, at least for now. Peter felt an instant’s hope, and at first did not associate the thing pressing into his stomach with the cop’s monster handgun. He thought of his father, who would sometimes poke him with the tip of his finger while giving him advice—using the finger to sort of tamp his aphorisms home—things like No one ever gets preg-nant if one of you keeps your pants on, Petie.

He didn’t realize it was the gun, not the cop’s oversized sausage of a finger, until Mary shrieked: “No! Oh, no!’ “Don’t—” Peter began.

“I don’t care if you’re a Jew or a Hindu,” the cop said, hugging Peter against him. He squeezed Peter’s shoulder chummily with his left hand as he cocked the.45 with his right. “In Desperation we don’t care about those things much.”

He pulled the trigger at least three times. There might have been more, but three reports were all Peter Jackson heard. They were muffled by his stomach, but still very loud. An incredible heat shot up through his chest and down through his legs at the same time, and he heard something wet drop on his shoes. He heard Mary, still screaming, but the sound seemed to come from far, far away.

Now I’ll wake up in my bed, Peter thought as his knees buckled and the world began to draw away, as bright as afternoon sunlight on the chrome side of a receding rail-road car.

Now I’ll—That was all. His last thought as the darkness swal-lowed him forever really wasn’t a thought at all, but an image: the bear on the dashboard next to the cop’s compass. Head jiggling. Painted eyes staring. The eyes turned into holes, the dark rushed out of them, and then he was gone.

Ralph Carver was somewhere deep in the black and didn’t want to come up. He sensed physical pain waiting—a hangover, perhaps, and a really spectacular one if he could feel his head aching even in his sleep—but not just that. Something else. Something to do with (Kirsten) this morning. Something to do with (Kirsten) their vacation. He had gotten drunk, he supposed pulled a real horror show, Ellie was undoubtedly pissed at him, but even that didn’t seem enough to account for how horrible he felt…

Screaming. Someone was screaming. But distant.

Ralph tried to burrow even deeper into the black, but now hands seized his shoulder and began shaking him Every shake sent a monstrous bolt of pain through his poor hungover head.

“Ralph! Ralph, wake up! You have to wake up!”

Ellie shaking him. Was he late for work. How could he be late for work. They were on vacation.

Then, shockingly loud, penetrating the blackness like the beam of a powerful light, gunshots. Three of them then a pause, then a fourth.

His eyes flew open and he bolted into a sitting position no idea for a moment where he was or what was hap-pening, only knowing that his head hurt horribly and felt the size of a float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Something sticky that fell like jam or maple syrup all down the side of his face. Ellen looking at him, one eye wide and frantic, the other nearly lost in a puffy com-plication of blue-black flesh.

Screaming. Somewhere. A woman. From below them. Maybe—He tried to get on his feet but his knees wouldn’t lock.

He fell forward off the bed he was sitting on (except it wasn’t a bed, it was a cot) and landed on his hands and knees. A fresh bolt of pain passed through his head, and for a moment he thought his skull would split open like an eggshell. Then he was looking down at his hands through clotted clumps of hair. Both hands were streaked with blood, the left considerably redder than the right. As he looked at them, sudden memory (Kirsten oh Jesus Ellie catch her)

burst in his head like a poison firework and he screamed himself, screamed down at his bloodstained hands, screamed as what he had been trying to burrow away from dropped into his mind like a stone into a pond. Kirsten had fallen down the stairs—No. Pushed.

The crazy bastard who had brought them here had pushed his seven-year-old daughter down the stairs. Ellie had reached for her and the crazy bastard had punched his wife in the eye and knocked her down. But Ellie had fallen on the stairs and Kirsten had plunged down them, her eyes wide open, full of shocked surprise, Ralph didn’t think she’d known what was happening, and if he could hold onto anything he would hold onto that, that it had all happened too fast for her to have any real idea, and then she had hit, she had cartwheeled, feet flying first upward and then backward, and there had been this sound, this awful sound like a branch breaking under a weight of ice, and suddenly everything about her had changed, he had seen the change even before she came to a stop at the foot of the stairs, as if that were no little girl down there but a stuffed dummy, headpiece full of straw.

Don’t think it, don ‘t think it, don’t you dare think it. Except he had to. The way she had landed… the way she had lain at the foot of the stairs with her head on one side…

Fresh blood was pattering down on his left hand, he saw. Apparently something was wrong with that side of his head. What had happened. Had the cop hit him, too, maybe with the butt of the monster sidearm he had been wearing. Maybe, but that part was mostly gone. He could remember the gruesome somersault she had done, and the way she had slid down the rest of the stairs, and how she had come to rest with her head cocked that way, and that was all. Christ, wasn’t it enough.

“Ralph.” Ellie was tugging at him and panting harshly “Ralph, get up! Please get up!”

“Dad! Daddy, come on!” That was David, from farther away. “He okay, Mom. He’s bleeding again, isn’t he.’ “No… no, he—”

“Yes he is, I can see it from here. Daddy, are you okay.”

“Yes,” he said. He got one foot planted beneath him groped for the bunk, and tottered upright. His left eye was bleary with blood. The lid felt as if it had been dipped in plaster of Paris. He wiped it with the heel of his hand wincing as fresh pain stung him—the area above his left eye felt like freshly tenderized meat. He tried to turn around, toward the sound of his son’s voice, and stag gered. It was like being on a boat. His balance was shot, and even when he stopped turning it felt to something in his head like he was still doing it, reeling and rocking going round and round. Ellie grabbed him, supported him, helped him forward.

“She’s dead, isn’t she.” Ralph asked. His choked voice came out of a throat plated with dead blood. He couldn believe what he heard that voice saying, but he supposed that in time he would. That was the worst of it. In time he would. “Kirsten’s dead.”

“I think so, yes.” Ellie staggered this time. “Grab the bars, Ralph, can you. You’re going to knock me over.”

They were in a jail cell. In front of him, just out of reach, was the barred door. The bars were painted white and in some places the paint had dried and hardened in thick runnels.

Ralph lunged forward a step and grabbed them. He was looking out at a desk, sitting in the middle of a square of floor like the single bit of stage dressing in a minimalist play.

There were papers on it, and a double barrelled shotgun, and a strew of fat green shotgun shells The old-fashioned wooden desk chair in the kneehole was on casters, and there was a faded blue pillow on the seat. Overhead was a light fixture encased in a mesh bowl. The dead flies inside the fixture made huge, gro-tesque shadows.

There were jail cells on three sides of this room. The one in the middle, probably the drunk-tank, was large and empty. Ralph and Ellie Carver were in a smaller one. A second small cell to their right was empty. Across from them were two other closet-sized cells.

In one of them was their eleven-year-old son, David, and a man with white hair. Ralph could see nothing else of this man, because he was sitting on the bunk with his head lowered onto his hands. When the woman screamed from below them again, David turned in that direction, where an open door gave on a flight of stairs (Kirsten, Kirsten falling, the snapping sound of her neck breaking) going down to street level, but the white-haired man did not shift his position in the slightest.

Ellie came to stand beside him and slipped an arm around his waist. Ralph risked letting go of the bars with one of his hands so he could take one of hers.

Now there were thuds on the stairs, coming closer, and scuffling sounds. Someone was being brought up to join them, but she wasn’t coming easily.

“We have to help him!” she was screaming. “We have to help Peter! We—”

Her words broke off as she was thrown into the room. She crossed it with weird, balletic grace, stuttering on her toes, white sneakers like ballet slippers, hands held out, hair streaming behind her, jeans, a faded blue shirt. She collided with the desk, upper thighs smacking the edge hard enough to move it backward toward the chair, and then, from the other side of the room, David was shriek-ing at her like a bird, standing at the bars, jumping up and down on the balls of his feet, shrieking in a savage, panicky voice Ralph had never heard before, never even suspected.

“The shotgun, lady!” David screamed. “Get the shot-gun, shoot him, shoot him, lady, shoot him!”

The white-haired man finally looked up. His face was old and dark with desert tan; the deep bags beneath his watery ginhead eyes gave him a bloodhound look.

“Get it!” the old man rasped. “For Christ’s sake, woman!”

The woman in the jeans and the workshirt looked toward the sound of the boy’s voice, then back over her shoulder toward the stairs and the clump of heavy approaching footfalls.

“Do it!” Ellie chimed in from beside Ralph. “He killed our daughter, he’ll kill all of us, do it!”

The woman in the jeans and workshirt grabbed for the gun.

UntiL Nevada, things had been fine.

They had started out as four happy wanderers from Ohio, destination Lake Tahoe. There Ellie Carver and the kids would swim and hike and sightsee for ten days and Ralph Carver would gamble—slowly, pleasurably, and with tremendous concentration. This would be their fourth visit to Nevada, their second to Tahoe, and Ralph would continue to follow his ironclad gambling rule: he would quit when he had either (a) lost a thousand dollars, or (b) won ten thousand. In their three previous trips, he had reached neither of these markers. Once he had gone back to Columbus with five hundred dollars of his stake intact, once with two hundred, and last year he had driven them back with over three thousand dollars in the inner lefthand pocket of his lucky safari jacket. On that trip they had stayed at Hiltons and Sheratons instead of in the RV at camping areas, and the elder Carvers had gotten themselves laid every damned night. Ralph considered that pretty phenomenal for people pushing forty.

“You’re probably tired of casinos,” he’d said in February, when they started talking about this vacation. “Maybe California this time. Mexico.”

“Sure, we can all get dysentery,” Ellie had replied. “Look at the Pacific between sprints to the casa de poo-p00, or whatever they call it down there.”

“What about Texas. We could take the kids to see the Alamo.”

“Too hot, too historic. Tahoe will be cool, even in July.

The kids love it. I do, too. And as long as you don’t come asking for any of my money when yours is gone—”

“You know I’d never do that,” he had said, sounding shocked. Feeling a little shocked, actually. The two of them sitting in the kitchen of their suburban home in Wentworth, not far from Columbus, sitting next to the bronze Frigidaire with the magnetic stick-on daisies scat-tered across it, travel-folders on the counter in front of them, neither aware that the gambling had already started and the first loss would be their daughter. “You know what I told you—”

“‘Once the addict-behavior starts, the gambling stops,’” she had repeated. “I know, I remember, I believe. You like Tahoe, I like Tahoe, the kids like Tahoe, Tahoe is fine.”

So he had made the reservations, and today—if it still was today—they had been on U.s.

50, the so-called loneliest highway in America, headed west across Nevada toward the High Sierra. Kirsten had been playing with Melissa Sweetheart, her favorite doll, Ellie had been nap-ping, and David had been sitting beside Ralph, looking out the window with his chin propped on his hand. Earlier he had been reading the Bible his new pal the Rev had given him (Ralph hoped to God that Martin wasn’t queer—the man was married, which was good, but still, you could never damn tell), but now he’d marked his place and tucked the Bible away in the console storage bin. Ralph thought again of asking the kid what he was thinking about, what all the Bible stuff was about, but you might as well ask a post what it was thinking. David (he could abide Davey but hated to be called Dave) was a strange kid that way, not like either parent. Not much like his sister, either, for that matter. This sudden interest in religion—what Ellen called “David’s God-trip”—was only one of his oddities. It would probably pass, and in the meantime, David did not quote verses at him on the subject of gambling, cursing, or avoiding the razor on weekends, and that was good enough for Ralph. He loved the kid, after all, and love stretched to cover a multitude of oddities. He had an idea that was one of the things love was for.

Ralph had been opening his mouth to ask David if he wanted to play Twenty Questions—there had been nothing much to look at since leaving Ely that morning and he was bored out of his mind—when he felt the Wayfarer’s steering suddenly go mushy in his hands and heard the highway-drone of the tires suddenly become a flapping sound.

“Dad.” David asked. He sounded concerned but not—panicked. That was good.

“Everything okay.”

“Hold on,” he had said, and began pumping the brakes. “This could be a little rough.”

Now, standing at the bars and watching the dazed woman who might be their only hope of surviving this—nightmare, he thought: I really had no idea of what rough was, did I.

It hurt his head to scream, but he screamed anyway, unaware of how much he sounded like his own son: “Shoot him, lady, shoot him!”

What Mary Jackson recalled, what caused her to reach for the shotgun even though she had never actually held a gun—rifle or pistol—in her entire life, was the memory of the big cop mixing the words I’m going to kill you into the Miranda warning.

And he meant it. Oh God yes.

She swung around with the gun. The big blond CO—was standing in the doorway, looking at her with his bright gray empty eyes.

“Shoot him, lady, shoot him!” a man screamed. He was in the cell to Mary’s right, standing next to a woman with an eye so black that the bruise had sent tendrils down her cheek, like ink injected beneath the skin. The man looked even worse; the left side of his face appeared to be covered with caked, half-dried blood.

The cop ran at her, his boots rattling on the hardwood floor. Mary stepped back, away from him and toward the big empty cell at the rear of the room, pulling back both of the shotgun’s hammers with the side of her thumb as she retreated. Then she raised it to her shoulder. She had no intention of warning hint I-fe had just killed her husband in cold blood, and she had no intention of warning him.

Ralph had pumped the brakes and held the wheel with his elbows locked, letting it work back and forth a little in his hands but not too much. He could feel the RV trying to yaw.

The secret to handling a high-speed blow-out in an RV, he’d been told, was to let it yaw—a little, anyway. Although—bad news, folks—this didn’t feel like just one blowout.

He glanced up into the rearview at Kirsten, who had stopped playing with Melissa Sweetheart and was now holding the doll against her chest. Kirstie knew something was going on, just not what.

“Kirsten, sit down!” he called. “Belt in!”

Except by then it was over. He wrestled the Wayfarer off the road, killed the engine, and wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. All in all he didn’t think he’d done badly. Hadn’t even toppled the vase of desert flowers standing on the table in back.

Ellie and Kirstie had picked them behind the motel in Ely this morning, while he and David were first loading up and then checking out.

“Good driving, Dad,” David said in a matter-of-fact voice.

Ellie was sitting up now, looking around blearily. “Bathroom break.” she asked.

“Why’re we tilted this way, Ralph.”

“We had a—”

He broke off, looking into the outside mirror. A police—car was rushing toward theni from behind, blue lights flashing. It came to a screaming stop about a hundred yards back, and the biggest cop Ralph had ever seen in his life almost hounded out. Ralph saw that the cop had his gun drawn, and felt adrenaline light up his nerves.

The cop stared right and left, his gun held up to shoul—der height with the muzzle pointing at the cloudless morn-ing sky. Then he actually turned in a circle. When he was facing the RV again, he looked directly into the outside rearview, seeming to meet Ralph’s eyes. The cop raised both hands over his head, brought them down violently, then raised and brought them down again. The pantomime was impossible to misinterpret—Stay inside, stay where you are.

“Ellie, lock the back doors.” Ralph banged down the button beside him as he spoke.

David, who was watching him, did the same thing on his side of the car without having to be asked.

“What.” She looked at him uncertainly. “What’s going on.”

“I don’t know, but there’s a cop back there and he looks excited.” Back where I had the flat, he thought, then amended that. The flats.

The cop bent and picked something up off the surface of the road. It was a meshy strip with little twinkles of light bouncing off it the way light bounces off the sequins on a woman’s evening dress. He carried it back to his car, dragging one end along the shoulder, his gun still in his other hand, still held up at a kind of port arms. He seemed to be trying to look in all directions at once.

Ellie locked the aft door and the main cabin door, then came forward again. “What in the samhill is going on.”

“I told you, I don’t know. But that doesn’t look, you know, real encouraging.” He pointed into the mirror out-side the driver’s window.

Ellie bent, planting her hands just above her knees and watching with Ralph as the cop dumped the meshy thing into the passenger seat, then backed around to the driver’s side with his gun now held up in both hands. Later it would occur to Ralph just how carefully crafted this little silent movie had been.

Kirstie came up behind ‘her mother and began to bop Melissa Sweetheart softly against her mother’s stuck-out bottom. “Butt, butt, butt, butt,” she sang. “We love a great big motherbutt.”

“Don’t, Kirstie.”

Ordinarily Kirstie would have needed two or three requests to cease and desist, but something in her mother’s voice this time caused her to stop at once. She looked at her brother, who was staring as intently into his mirror as the grownups were into Daddy’s. She went over to him and tried to get in his lap. David set her back on her feet gently but firmly. “Not now, Pie.”

“But what is it. What’s the big deal.”

“Nothing, no big deal,” David said, never taking his eyes off the mirror.

The cop got into his cruiser and drove up the road to the Wayfarer. He got out again, his gun still out but now held along his leg with the muzzle pointed at the road. He looked right and left again, then walked over to Ralph’s window. The driver’s position in the Wayfarer was much higher than a car’s seat would have been, but the cop was so tall—six-seven, at least—that he was still able to look down on Ralph as he sat behind the wheel in his captain’s chair.

The cop made a cranking gesture with his empty hand. Ralph rolled his window halfway down. “What’s the trouble, Officer.”

“How many are you.” the cop asked.

“What’s wr—”

“Sir, how many are you.”

“Four,” Ralph said, beginning to feel really frightened now. “My wife, my two kids, me.

We have a couple of flats—”

“No, sir, all your tires are flat. You ran over a piece of highway carpet.”

“I don’t—”

“It’s a strip of mesh embedded with hundreds of short nails,” the cop said. “We use it to stop speeders whenever we can—it beats the hell out of hot pursuit.”

“What was a thing like that doing in the road.” Ellie asked indignantly.

The cop said, “I’m going to open the rear door of my car, the one closest to your RV.

When you see that, I want you to exit your vehicle and get into the back of mine. And quickly.”

He craned his neck, saw Kirsten—she was now holding onto her mother’s leg and peering cautiously around it—and gave her a smile. “Hi, girly-o.”

Kirstie smiled back at him.

The cop shifted his eyes briefly to David. He nodded, and David nodded back noncommittally. “Who’s out there, sir.” David asked.

“A bad guy,” the cop said. “That’s all you need to know for now, son. A very bad guy.

Takr’ “Officer—” Ralph began.

“Sir, with all due respect, I feel like a clay pigeon in a shooting gallery. There’s a dangerous man out here he’s good with a rifle, and that piece of highway carpet suggests he’s nearby. Further discussion of the situation must wait until our position has been improved, do you understand.”

Tak. Ralph wondered. Was that the bad guy’s name9 “Yes, but—”

“You first, sir. Carry your little girl. The boy next Your wife last. You’ll have to cram, but you can all fit into the car.”

Ralph unbelted and stood up. “Where are we going” he asked.

“Desperation. Mining town. Eight miles or so from here.”

Ralph nodded, rolled up his window, then picked up Kirsten. She looked at him with troubled eyes that were not far from tears.

“Daddy, is it Mr. Big Boogeyman.” she asked. Mr. Big Boogeyman was a monster she had brought home from school one day. Ralph didn’t know which of the kids had described this shadowy closet-dweller to his gentle seven—r year-old daughter, but he thought if he could have found him (he simply assumed it was a boy, it seemed to him that the care and feeding of the monsters in the school-yards of America always fell to the boys), he would have cheerfully strangled the bugger. It had taken two months to get Kirstie more or less soothed down about Mr. Big Boogeyman. Now this.

“No, not Mr. Big Boogeyman,” Ralph said. “Probably just a postal worker having a bad day.”

“Daddy, you work for the post office,” she said as he carried her back toward the door in the middle of the Wayfarer’s cabin.

“Yup,” he said, aware that Ellie had put David in front of her and was walking with her hands on his shoulders. “It’s sort of ajoke, see.”

“Like a knock-knock without the knocking.”

“Yup,” he said again. He looked out the window in the RV’s cabin door and saw the cop had opened the back door of the police cruiser. He also saw that when he opened the Wayfarer’s door, it would overlap the car door, making a protective wall. That was good.

Sure. Unless the desert rat this guy’s looking for is in back of us. Christ Almighty, why couldn’t we have gone to Atlantic City.

“Dad.” That was David, his intelligent but slightly peculiar son who had started going to church last fall, after the thing that had happened to his friend Brian. Not Sunday school, not Thursday Night Youth Group, just church. And Sunday afternoons at the parsonage, talking with his new friend, the Rev. Who, by the way, was going to die slowly if he had been sharing anything with David but his thoughts. According to David it was all talk, and after the thing with Brian, Ralph supposed the kid needed someone to talk to. He only wished David had felt able to bring his questions to his mother and father instead of to some holy joe outsider who was married but still might—“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 Ques-tions, 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 DES-PERATION, 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 hori-zon, 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 head-quarters 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, I. you ye 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 appar ently wasn’t the kind of fear that made your bands shake (it’s a dry fright, he thought with a tiny and not very char acteristic 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 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 he. 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 Sweet heart 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 any-where 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.”

An hour Later the cop ran at the woman in the jeans and the workshirt, his cowboy boots rattling on the hard—wood 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 ham-mers 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 drop-ping 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 de-cided 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 squall-ing. 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. I)oesn’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 for-ward 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 chair—back’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 voy-aged 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 expres-sion 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.”

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 apiss.

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 admit-tedly been a little long in the tooth by then) and been spoken of in connection with the Nobel Prize for Litera-ture. 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.

Idon’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.

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 hut 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. lt 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 cailed “the only living American writer of John Stein-beck’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 Be]-Air hotel… and then to take her emeralds elsewhere.

That incident hadn’t marked the beginning of his 2 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 lije. 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 ap-pearances 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 Shake-speare’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 sus tam 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 creneliated thing that looked like a radiation-baked giant brain in a fifties drive-in horror movie. He should have at 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 w’hat 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 dis-eases 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—OU 7 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 7 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 2 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 motor-cycle, its blue flashers turning lazily in the hot desert daylight.

It was his first wife who provided Johnny Marinville with what might be his last chance.

Oh, not his last chance to publish his work; shit, no. He would be able to go on doing that as long as he remained capable of (a) putting words on paper and (b) sending them off to his agent. Once you’d been accepted as a bona fide literary lion, someone would be glad to go on pub-lishing your words even after they had degenerated into self-parody or outright drivel. Johnny sometimes thought that the most terrible thing about the American literary establishment was how they let you swing in the wind, slowly strangling, while they all stood around at their ass—hole cocktail parties, congratulating themselves on how kind they were being to poor old what’ s-his-name.

No, what Terry gave him wasn’t his last chance to publish, but maybe his last to write something realJy worthwhile, something that would get him noticed again in a positive way. Something that might also sell like crazy… and he could use the money, there was no doubt about that.

Best of all, he didn’t think Terry had the slightest idea of what she had said, which meant he wouldn’t have to share any of the proceeds with her, if proceeds there were. He wouldn’t even have to mention her on the Acknowl-edgements page. if he didn’t want to, but he supposed he probably would. Sobering up had been a terrifying experi—ence in many ways, but it did help a person remember his responsibilities.

He had married Terry when he was twenty-five and she was twenty-one, a junior at Vassar. She had never fin-ished college. They had been married for almost twenty years and during that time she had borne him three chii—2 dren, all grown now. One of them, Bronwyn, still talked to him. The other two… well, if they ever got tired of cutting off their noses to spite their faces, he would be around. He was not by nature a vindictive man.

Terry seemed to know that. After five years during which their only communication had been through law yers, they had begun a cautious dialogue. sometimes by letter, more often by telephone. These communications had been tentative at first, both of them afraid of mines still buried in the ruined city of their affections, but over the years they had become more regular. Terry regarded her famous ex with a kind of stoic, amused interest that he found distressing, somehow—it was not, in his opinion, the sort of attitude an ex—wife was supposed to have for a man who had gone on to become one of the most dis cussed writers of his generation. But she also spoke to him with a straightforward kindness that he found sooth ing, like a cool hand on a hot brow.

They had been in contact more since he’d quit drinking (but still always by phone or by letter; both of them seemed to know, even without discussing it, that meeting face to face would put too much pressure on the fragile bond they had forged), but in some ways these sober con-versations had been even more dangerous… not acrimo-nious, but always with that possibility. She wanted him to go back to Alcoholics Anonymous, told him bluntly that if he didn’t, he’d eventually start drinking again. And the 2 drugs would follow, she said, as surely as dark comes after twilight.

Johnny told her he had no intention of spending the rest of his life sitting in church basements with a bunch of 2 drunks, all of them talking about how wonderful it was to have a power greater than one’s self… before getting back into their old cars and driving home to their mostly spouseless houses to feed their cats. “People in AA are generally too fundamentally broken to see that they’ve turned their lives over to an empty concept and a failed ideal,” he said. “Take it from me, I’ve been there. Or take it from John Cheever, if you like. He wrote particularly well about that.”

“John Cheever isn’t writing much these days,” Terry replied. “I think you know why, too.”

Terry could be irritating, no doubt about that.

it was three months ago that she had given him the great idea, tossing it off in a casual conversation that had rambled through what the kids were up to, what she was up to, and, of course, what he was up to. What he had been up to in the early part of this year was agonizing over the first two hundred pages of a historical novel about Jay Gould. He had finally seen it for what it was—warmed-over Gore Vidal—and trashed it. Baked it, actu-ally. In a fit of pique he had resolved to keep entirely to himself, he had tossed his computer-storage discs for the novel into the microwave and given them ten minutes on high. The stench had been unbelievable, a thing that had come roaring out of the kitchen with quills on it, and he’d actually had to replace the microwave.

Then he’d found himself telling Terry the whole thing. When he finished, he sat in his office chair with the phone pressed to his ear and his eyes closed, waiting for her to tell him not to bother with resuming the AA meetings, that what he needed was a good shrink, and in a hurry.

Instead she said he should have put the discs in a casse-role dish and used the convection oven. He knew she was joking—and that she thought at least part of the joke was on him—but her acceptance of the way he was and how he behaved still felt like a cool hand on a fevered brow. It wasn’t approval he got from her, but approval wasn’t what he wanted.

“Of course you never were much good in the kitchen,” she said, and her matter-of-fact tone made him laugh out loud. “So what are you going to do now, Johnny. Any idea.”

“Not the slightest.”

“You ought to write some nonfiction. Get away from the whole idea of the novel for awhile.”

“That’s dumb, Terry. I can’t write nonfiction, and you know it.”

“I know nothing of the kind,” she’d said, speaking in a sharp don’t-be-a-fool tone he got from no one else these days, least of all from his agent. The more Johnny flopped and flailed around, the more gruesomely obsequious Bill Harris became, it seemed. “During the first two years we were married, you must have written at least a dozen essays. Published them, too. For good money. Life, Harp-er’s, even a couple in The New Yorker. Easy for you to 2 forget; you weren’t the one who did the shopping and paid the bills. 1 loved the puppies.”

“Oh. The so-called American Heart Essays. Right. I didn’t forget em, Terry, 1 blocked em out. Rent-payers after the last of the Guggenheim dough was gone; that’s basically what they were. They’ve never even been collected.”

“You wouldn’t allow them to be collected,” she re-torted. “They didn’t fit your golden idea of immortality.”

Johnny greeted this with silence. Sometimes he hated her memory. She’d never been able to write worth a shit herself, the stuff she’d been turning in to her Honors writing seminar the year he met her had been just hor-rible, and since then she’d never published anything more complex than a letter to the editor, but she was a champ at data-storage. He had to give her that.

“You there, Johnny.”

“I’m here.”

“I always know when I’m telling you stuff you don’t like,” she said brightly, “because it’s the only time you ever shut up. You get all broody.”

“Well, I’m here,” he repeated heavily, and fell silent again, hoping she would change the subject. She didn’t, of course.

“You did three or four of those essays because someone a—cked for them, I don’t remember who—”

Amiracle, he had thought. She doesn ‘t remember who. “—and I’m sure you would have stopped there, except by then you were getting queries from other editors. It didn’t surprise me a bit. Those essays were good.”

He was silent this time, not to indicate disinterest or disapproval but because he was thinking back, trying to remember if they had been any good. Terry couldn’t be 2 trusted a hundred per cent when it came to such questions, but you couldn’t throw her conclusions out of court with—‘ out a hearing, either. As a fiction-writer she’d been of the “I saw a bird at sunrise and my heart leaped up” school, but as a critic she had been tough as nails and capable of insights which were spooky, almost like telepathy. One of the things that had attracted him to her (although he supposed the fact that she had the best breasts in America back in those days had helped matters along) was the dichotomy between what she wanted to do—write fiction—and what she was able to do, which was to write criticism that could cut like a diamond chip.

As for the so-called American Heart Essays, the only one he could remember clearly after all these years was Death on the Second Shift.” It had been about a father and son working together in a Pittsburgh steel-mill. The father had had a heart-attack and died in his son’s arms on the third day of Johnny Marinville’s four-day research junket. He had meant to focus on an entirely dif-ferent aspect of millwork, but had changed course at once, and without a second thought. The result had been a wretchedly sentimental piece—the fact that every word was true hadn’t changed that in the slightest—but it had also been a tremendously popular piece. The man who’d edited it for Life dropped him a note six weeks later and said it had generated the fourth4argest volume of letters in the magazine’s history.

Other stuff started to come back to him—titles, mostly, things like “Feeding the Flames”

and “A Kiss on Lake Saranac.” Terrible titles, but… fourth-largest volume of letters.

Hmm mm.

Where might those old essays be. in the Marinville Collection at Fordham. Possible.

Hell, they might even be in the attic of the cottage in Connecticut. He wouldn’t mind a look at them. Maybe they could be updated… or…

Something began to nibble at the back of his mind.

“Do you still have your scoot, Johnny.”

“Huh.” He barely heard her.

“Your scoot. Your ride. Your motorcycle.”

“Sure,” he said. “It’s stored at that garage out in West-port we used to use. You know the one.”

“Gibby’s.”

“Yeah, Gibby’s. Someone different owns it now, but it used to be Gibby’s Garage, yeah.”

He had been blind—sided by a brilliantly textured memory: he and Terry, fully clothed and petting like mad behind Gibby’s Garage one afternoon in… well, a long time ago, leave it at that, Terry had been wearing a pair of tight blue shorts. He doubted if her mother would have approved of them, God, no, but he himself had thought those discount-store spe—2 cials made her look like the Queen of the Western World. Her ass was only good, but her legs… man, those legs had gone not just up to her chin but all the way out to Arc-turus and beyond. How had they gotten out there in the first place, among the cast-off tires and rusty engine parts standing hip-deep in sunflowers and feeling each other up. He couldn’t remember, but he remembered the rich curve of her breast in his hand, and how she’d gripped the belt-loops of his jeans when he cried out against her neck, hauling him closer so he could come tight and hard against her taut belly.

He dropped a hand into his lap and wasn’t exactly sur prised at what he found there. Say, folks, Frampton comes alive.“… new bunch, or maybe even a book.”

He settled his hand firmly back on the arm of his chair “Huh. What.”

“Are you going deaf as well as senile.”

“No. I was remembering one time with you behind 2 Gibby’s. Making out.”

“Oh. In the sunflowers, right.”

“Right.”

There was a long pause when she might have been con-sidering some further comment on that interlude. Johnny — ‘ was almost hoping for one. Instead, she went back to her previous scripture.

“1 said maybe you ought to drive across country on your bike before you get too old to work the footgears, or start drinking again and splash yourself all over the Black Hills.”

“Are you out of your mind. I haven’t been on that thing in three years, and I have no intention of getting back on, Terry. My eyesight sucks—”

“So get a stronger pair of glasses—”

“—and my reflexes are shot. John Cheever may or may not have died of alcoholism, but John Gardner definitely went out on a motorcycle. Had an argument with a tree.

He lost. It happened on a road in Pennsylvania. One I’ve driven myself.”

Terry wasn’t listening. She was one of the few people in the world who felt perfectly comfortable ignoring him and letting her own thoughts carry her away. He supposed that was another reason he’d divorced her. He didn’t like being ignored, especially by a woman.

“You could cross the country on your motorcycle and collect material for a new bunch of essays,” she was saying. She sounded both excited and amused. “If you front-loaded the best of the early bunch—as Part One, you know—you’d have a pretty good-sized book.

American Heart, 1 966—1996, essays by John Edward Marinville.” She giggled. “Who knows. You might even get another good notice from Shelby Foote. That’s the one you always liked the best, wasn’t it.” She paused for his reply, and when it didn’t come, she asked him if he was there, first lightly, then with a little concern.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m here.” He was suddenly glad he was sitting down. “Listen, Terry, I have to go. I’ve got an appointment.”

“New lady-friend.”

“Podiatrist,” he said, thinking Foote, thinking foot. That name was like the final number in a bank-vault com-bination. Click, and the door swings open.

“Well, take care of yourself,” she said. “And honest to God, Johnny, think about getting back to AA. I mean, what can it hurt.”

“Nothing, I suppose,” he said, thinking about Shelby Foote, who had once called John Edward Marinville the only living American writer of John Steinbeck’s stature, and Terry was right—of all the praisenuggets he’d ever gotten, that was the one he liked the best.

“Right, nothing.” She paused. “Johnny, are you all right. Cause you sound like you’re hardly there.”

“Fine. Say hello to the kids for me.”

“I always do. They usually respond with what my ma used to call potty-words, but I always do. Bye.”

He hung up without looking at the telephone, and when it fell off the edge of the desk and onto the floor, he still didn’t look around. John Steinbeck had crossed the country with his dog in a makeshift camper. Johnny had a barely used 1340-cc Harley-Davidson Softail stored out in Connecticut. Not American Heart. She was wrong about that, and not just because it was the name of a Jeff Bridges movie from a few years back. Not American Heart but—“Travels with Harley,” he murmured.

It was a ridiculous title, a laughable title, like a Mad 2 magazine parody… but was it any worse than an essay titled “Death on the Second Shift” or “Feeding the Flames”. He thought not… and he felt the title would work, would rise above its punny origins. He had always trusted his intuitions, and he hadn’t had one as strong as this in years. He could cross the country on his red-and—cream Softail, from the Atlantic where it touched Con-necticut to the Pacific where it touched California. A book of essays that might cause the critics to entirely rethink their image of him, a book of essays that might even get him back on the bestseller lists, if… if…

“If it was bighearted,” he said. His heart was thumping hard in his chest, but for once the feel of that didn’t scare him. “Bighearted like Blue Highways. Bighearted like. well, like Steinbeck.”

Sitting there in his office chair with the telephone bur ring harshly at his feet, what Johnny Marinville had seen was nothing less than redemption. A way out.

He had scooped the telephone up and called his agent his fingers flying over the buttons.

“Bill,” he said, “it’s Johnny. I was just sitting here, thinking about some essays I wrote when I was a kid, and I had a fantastic idea. It’s going to sound crazy at first, but hear me out…”

As Johnny made his way up the sandy slope to the highway, trying not to pant too much, he saw that the guy standing behind his Harley and writing down the plate number was the biggest damned chunk of cop he had ever seen—six-six at least, and at least two hundred and sev-enty pounds on the hoof.

“Afternoon, Officer,” Johnny said. He looked down at himself and saw a tiny dark spot on the crotch of his Levi’s. No matter how much you jump and dance, he thought.

“Sir, are you aware that parking a vehicle on a state road is against the law.” the cop asked without look-ing up.

“No, but I hardly think—”

— it can be much of a problem on a road as deserted as U.s. 50 was how he meant to finish, and in the haughty “How dare you question my judgement.” tone that he had been using on underlings and service people for years, but then he saw something that changed his mind. There was blood on the right cuff and sleeve of the cop’s shirt, quite a lot of it, drying now to a maroon glaze. He had probably finished moving some large piece of roadkill off the highway not very long ago—likely a deer or an elk hit by a speeding semi. That would explain both the blood and the bad temper. The shirt looked like a dead loss; that much blood would never come out.

“Sir.” the cop asked sharply. He had finished writ-ing down the plate number now but went on looking at the bike, his blond eyebrows drawn together, his mouth scrimped flat.

It was as if he didn’t want to look at the bike’s owner, as if he knew that would only make him feel lousier than he did already. “You were saying.”

“Nothing, Officer,” Johnny said. He spoke in a neutral tone, not humble but not haughty, either. He didn’t want to cross this big lug when he was clearly having a bad day.

Still without looking up, his notepad strangled in one hand and his gaze fixed severely on the Harley’s taillight, the cop said: “It’s also against the law to relieve yourself within sight of a state road. Did you know that.”

“No, I’m sorry,” Johnny said. He felt a wild urge to laugh bubbling around in his chest and suppressed it.

“Well, it is. Now, I’m going to let you go He looked up for the first time, looked at Johnny, and his eyes widened. . go with a warning this time, but…

He trailed off, eyes now as wide as a kid’s when the circus parade comes thumping down the street in a swirl of clowns and trombones. Johnny knew the look, although he had never expected to see it out here in the Nevada desert, and on the face of a gigantic Scandahoovian cop who looked as if his reading tastes might run the gamut from Playboy’s Party Jokes to Guns and Ammo magazine.

Afan, he thought. I’m out here in the big nowhere between Ely and Austin, and I’ve found a by-God fan.

He couldn’t wait to tell Steve Ames about this when 2 they met up in Austin tonight.

Hell, he might call him on the cellular later on this afternoon… if the cellulars worked out here, that was. Now that he thought about it, he supposed they didn’t. The battery in his was up, he’d had it on the charger all last night, but he hadn’t actually talked to Steve on the damned thing since leaving Salt Lake City. In truth he wasn’t all that crazy about the cel-lulars. He didn’t think they actually did cause cancer, that was probably just more tabloid scare-stuff, but…

“Holy shit,” the cop muttered. His right hand, the one below the bloodstained cuff and sleeve, went up to his right cheek. For one bizarre moment he looked to Johnny like a pro football lineman doing a Jack Benny riff. “Ho lee shit.”

“What’s the trouble, Officer.” Johnny asked. He was, with some difficulty, suppressing a smile. One thing hadn’t changed over the years: he loved to be recognized God, how he loved it.

“You’re… JohnEdwardMarinville!” the cop gasped, running it all together, as if he really had only one name, like Pele or Cantinflas. The cop was now starting to grin himself, and Johnny thought, Oh Mr. Policeman, what big teeth you have. “I mean, you are, aren’t you. You wrote Delight! And, oh shit, Song of the Hammer! I’m standing right next to the guy who wrote Song of the Hammer!” And then he did something which Johnny found genu-inely endearing: reached out and touched the sleeve of his motorcycle jacket, as if to prove that the man wearing it was actually real. “Ho-lee shit!”

“Well, yes, I’m Johnny Marinville,” he said, speaking in the modest tones he reserved for these occasions (and these occasions only, as a rule). “Although I have to tell you that I’ve never been recognized by someone who’s just watched me take a leak by the side of the road.”

“Oh, forget that,” the cop said, and seized Johnny s hand. For just a moment before the cop’s fingers closed over his, Johnny saw that the man’s hand was also smeared with half-dried blood; both lifeline and loveline stood out a dark, liverish red.

Johnny tried to keep his smile in place as they shook, and thought he did pretty well, but he was aware that the corners of his mouth seemed to have gained weight. It’s getting on me, he thought. And there won’t be anyplace to wash it off before Aust in…

“Man,” the cop was saying, “you are one of my favorite writers! I mean, gosh, Song of the Hammer… I know the critics didn’t like it, but what do they know.”

“Not much,” Johnny said. He wished the cop would let go of his hand, but the cop was apparently one of those people who shook for punctuation and emphasis as well as greeting. Johnny could feel the latent strength in the cop’s grip; if the big guy squeezed down, his favorite writer would be keyboarding his new book lefthanded, at least for the first month or two.

“Not much, damned straight! Song of the Hammer’s the best book about Vietnam I ever read. Forget Tim O’Brien, Robert Stone—”

“Well, thank you, thanks very much.”

The cop finally loosened his grip and Johnny retrieved his hand. He wanted to look down at it, see how much blood was on it, but this clearly wasn’t the time. The cop was sticking his abused notepad into his back pocket again and staring at Johnny in a wide—eyed, intense way that was actually a little disturbing. It was as if he feared Johnny would disappear like a mirage if he so much as blinked.

“What are you doing out here, Mr. Marinville. Gosh! I thought you lived back East!”

“Well, I do, but—”

“And this is no kind of transportation for a… a… well, I’ve got to say it: for a national resource. Why, do you realize what the ratio of drivers-to-accidents on motorcycles is.

Computed on a road-hours basis. I can tell you that because I’m a wolf and we get a circular every month from the National Safety Council. It’s one accident per four hundred and sixty drivers per day. That sounds good, I know, until you consider the ratio of dri-vers-to-accidents on passenger vehicles. That’s one in twenty-seven thousand per day. That’s some big differ-ence. It makes you think, doesn’t it.”

“Yes.” Thinking, Did he say something about being a wolj did I hear that. “Those statistics are pretty… pretty Pretty what. Come on, Marinviile, get it together. If you can spend an hour with a hostile bitch from Ms. magazine and still not take a drink, surely you can deal with this guy. He’s only trying to show his con-cern for you, after all.

“They’re pretty impressive,” he finished.

“So what are you doing out here. And on such an unsafe mode of transportation.”

“Gathering material.” Johnny found his eyes dropping to the cop’s blood-stiffened right sleeve and forcibly dragged them back up to his sunburned face. He doubted if many of the people on this guy’s beat gave him a hard time: he looked like he could eat nails and spit razor-wire, even though he really didn’t have the right skin for this climate.

“For a new novel.” The cop was excited. Johnny looked briefly at the man’s chest, hunting for a name—tag, but there was none.

“Well, a new book, anyway. Can I ask you something, Officer.”

“Sure, yeah, but I ought to be asking you the questions, I got about a gajillion of em. I never thought… out in the middle of nowhere and I meet… ho-lee shit!”

Johnny grinned. It was hotter than hell out here and he wanted to get moving before Steve was on his ass—he hated looking into the rearview and seeing that big yellow truck back there, it broke the mood, somehow—but it was hard not to be moved by the man’s artless enthusiasm, especially when it was directed at a subject which Johnny himself regarded with respect, wonder, and yes. awe.

“Well, since you’re obviously familiar with my work, what would you think of a book of essays about life in contemporary America.”

“By you.”

“By me. A kind of loose travelogue called”—he took a deep breath—“Travels with Harley”.

He was prepared for the cop to look puzzled, or to guffaw the way people did at the punchline of a joke. The cop did neither. He simply looked back down at the tail-light of Johnny’s bike, one hand rubbing his chin (it was the chin of a Bernie Wrightson comic—book hero, square and cleft), brow furrowed, considering carefully. Johnny took the opportunity to peek surreptitiously at his own hand. There was blood on it, all right, quite a lot. Mostly on the back and smeared across the fingernails. Uck.

Then the cop looked up and stunned him by saying exactly what Johnny himself had been thinking over the last two days of monotonous desert driving. “It could work,” he said, “but the cover ought to be a photo of you on your drag, here. A serious picture, so folks’d know you weren’t trying to make fun of John Steinbeck… or your own self, for that matter.”

“That’s it!” Johnny cried, barely restraining himself from clapping the big cop on the back. “That’s the great danger, that people should go in thinking it’s some kind of… of weird joke. The cover should convey seriousness of purpose… maybe even a certain grimness… what would you think of just the bike. A photo of the bike, maybe sepia—toned. Sitting in the middle of some country highway… or even out here in the desert, on the center-line of Highway 50… shadow stretching off to the side The absurdity of having this discussion out here, with a towering cop who had been about to issue him a warning for pissing on the tumbleweeds, wasn’t lost on him, but it didn’t cut into his excitement, either.

And once again the cop told him exactly what he wanted to hear.

“No! Good gosh, no. It’s got to be you.”

“Actually, I think so, too,” Johnny said. “Sitting on the bike… maybe with the kickstand down and my feet up on the pegs… casual, you know… casual, but…

… but real,” the cop said. He looked up at Johnny, his gray eyes forbidding, then back down at the bike again. “Casual but real. No smile. Don’t you dare smile, Mr.

Marinville.”

“No smile,” Johnny agreed, thinking, This guy is a genius.

“And a little distant,” the cop said. “Looking off. Like you were thinking of all the miles you’d been—”

“Yeah, and all the miles I’ve still got to go.” Johnny looked up at the horizon to get a feel for that look—the old warrior gazing west, a Cormac McCarthy kind of deal—and again saw the vehicle parked off the road a mile or two up. His long-range vision was still pretty good, and the sunglare had shifted enough for him to be almost sure it was an RV.

“Literal and metaphorical miles.”

“Yep, both kinds,” this amazing cop said. “Travels with Harley. I like it. It’s ballsy. And of course, I’d read any-thing you wrote, Mr. Marinville. Novels, essays, poems hell, your laundry list.”

“Thanks,” Johnny said, touched. “I appreciate that. You’ll probably never know how much. The last year or so has been difficult for me. A lot of doubt. Questioning my own identity, and my purpose.”

“I know a little about those things myself,” the cop said. “You might not think so, guy like me, but I do. Why, if you knew the day I’ve put in already… Mr. Mar-inville, could I possibly have your autograph.”

“Of course, it would be a pleasure,” Johnny said, and took his own pad out of his back pocket. He opened it and paged past notes, directions, route numbers, frag-ments of map in blurred soft pencil (these latter had been drawn by Steve Ames, who had quickly realized that his famous client, although still able to ride his cycle with a fair degree of safety, ended up lost and fuming in even small cities without help). At last he found a blank page. “What’s your name, Offi—”

He was interrupted by a long, trembling howl that chilled his blood… not just because it was clearly the sound of a wild animal but because it was close. The notepad dropped from his hand and he turned on his heels so quickly that he staggered. Standing just off the south edge of the road, not fifty yards away, was a mangy canine with thin legs and scanty, starved-looking sides. Its gray pelt was tangled with burdocks and there was an ugly red sore on its foreleg, but Johnny barely noticed these things. What fascinated him was the creature’s muzzle, which seemed to be grinning, and its yellow eyes, which looked both stupid and cunning.

“My God,” he murmured. “What’s that. Is it a—”

“Coyote,” the cop said, pronouncing it ki-yote. “Some people out here call em desert wolves.”

That’s what he said, Johnny thought. Something about seeing a coyote, a desert wolf You just misunderstood. This idea relieved him even though a part of his mind didn’t believe it at all.

The cop took a step toward the coyote, then another. He paused, then took a third. The coyote stood its ground but began to shiver all over. Urine squirted from under its chewed-looking flank. A gust of wind turned the paltry stream into a scatter of droplets.

When the cop took a fourth step toward it, the coyote raised its scuffed muzzle and howled again, a long, ulu-lating sound that made Johnny’s arms ripple with goose-flesh and his balls pull up.

“Hey, don’t get it going,” he said to the cop. “That’s tres creepy.

The cop ignored him. He was looking at the coyote, which was now looking intently back at him with its yellow gaze. “Tak,” the cop said. “Tak ah lah.”

The wolf went on staring at him, as if it understood this Indian-sounding gibberish, and the goosebumps on Johnny’s arms stayed up. The wind gusted again, blowing his dropped notepad over onto the shoulder of the road, where it came to rest against a jutting chunk of rock. Johnny didn’t notice. His pad and the autograph he’d intended to give the cop were, for the moment, the fur-thest things from his mind.

This goes in the hook, he thought. Everything else I’ve seen is still up for grabs, but this goes in. Rock solid. Rock goddam solid.

“Tak,” the cop said again, and clapped his hands together sharply, once. The coyote turned and loped away, running on those scrawny legs with a speed Johnny never would have expected. The big man in the khaki urn—form watched until the coyote’s gray pelt had merged into the general dirty gray of the desert. It didn’t take long.

“Gosh, aren’t they ugly.” tbe cop said. “And just lately they’re thicker’n ticks on a blanket. You don’t see em in the morning or early afternoon, when it’s hottest, but late afternoon… evening… toward dark…” He shook his head as if to say There you go.

“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 iistening 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 ‘ye 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 ‘I 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 un-buckled now.

He had been an intuitive man all his life; it was intui-tion, 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.

1want 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-yotes2 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, not 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 i—2 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 every thing, 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 disap-pointing. 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 prac-tical 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 con-cept 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 co-herent 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 Demo cratic 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 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-wH0000, 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.

He coutdn’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 gener-ally 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 throb-bing 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 cel-lular 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 dis-play, 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 5, which stood for “ser-vice,” 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 reap-peared, 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 see 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 pro-grammed 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 2 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. “Wel-come 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.”

The cop stood there looking down at the bike, his shadow now seeming to stretch out across half a mile of desert, and Johnny peered at him through the bottom of the window with his clotted hair in his eyes and the phone mashed against his right ear. He let out a long, shaky sigh of relief as the cop stepped forward and began to kick sand again, this time spraying it over the Harley’s handlebars.

In his ear the telephone began to ring, and this time the sound was scratchy and distant. If the signal was going through—and the quality of this ring seemed to indicate that it was—another Motorola telephone, this one on the dashboard of a Ryder truck somewhere between fifty and two hundred and fifty miles east of John Edward Mar-inville’s current position, was now ringing.

Down in the desert, the cop went on kicking and kicking, burying the handlebars of Johnny’s scoot.

Two rings… three rings… four.

He had one more, two at the most, before another robot voice came on the line and told him that the customer he was calling was either out of range or had left the vehicle.

Johnny, still crying, closed his eyes. In the throbbing, red—tinged darkness behind his lids he saw the Ryder truck parked in front of a roadside gas station/general store just west of the Utah—Nevada state line. Steve was inside, buying a pack of his damned cigars and goofing with the counter girl, while outside, on the Ryder’s dashboard, the cellular phone—Steve’s half of the corn-link Johnny’s agent had insisted upon—rang in the empty cab.

Five rings…

And then, distant, almost lost in static but sounding like the voice of an angel bent down from heaven all the same, he heard Steve’s flat West Texas drawl: “Hello… you boss.”

An eastbound semi blew by outside, rocking the cruiser in its backwash. Johnny barely noticed, and made no attempt to flag the driver. He probably wouldn’t have done even if his attention hadn’t been focused on the tele-phone and Steve’s tenuous voice. The rig was doing sev-enty at least. What the hell was the driver going to see in the two-tenths of a second it would take him to pass the parked cruiser, especially through the thick dust matted on the windows.

He drew in breath through his nose and hawked back blood, ignoring the pain, wanting to clear his voice as much as he could.

“Steve! Steve, I’m in trouble. I’m in bad trouble!”

There was a heavy crackle of static in his ear and — he was sure he’d lost Steve, but when it cleared he heard: up, boss. Say again!”

“Steve, it’s Johnny! Do you hear me.”

“Hear you… What’s…” Another crackle. It almost completely buried the next word, but Johnny thought it might have been “trouble.” I hear you, what’s the trouble2 God, let that not just he wishful thinking. Please God The cop had stopped kicking sand again. He stepped away for another critical look at his handiwork, then turned and began to plod back toward the road, head down, hatbrim shading his face, hands plunged deep into his pockets. And then, with a sense of mounting horror Johnny realized he had no idea what to tell Steve. All his attention had been focused on making the call, ramming it through by sheer willpower, if that was what it took.

Now what.

He had no clear idea of where he was, only that—“I’m west of Ely on Highway 50,” he said. More sweat ran into his eyes, stinging. “I’m not sure how far west forty miles at least, probably more. There’s an RV pulled off the road a little farther up from me.

There’s a cop not a state cop, a townie, I think, but I don’t know which town… I didn’t see it on the door… I don’t even know his name…” He was talking faster and faster as the cop got closer and closer; soon he would be babbling.

Take it easy, he’s still a hundred yards away, you ‘ye got plenty of time. For the love of God, just do what comes naturally—do what they pay you for, do what you’ve been doing all your life. Communicate, for Christ’s sake!

But he had never had to do it for his life. To make money, to be known in the right circles, to occasionally raise his voice in the roar of the brave old lion, yes, all those things, but never for his literal life. And if the cop looked up out of his head-down plod and saw him… he was crouched down but the phone’s antenna was sticking up, of course, it had to be sticking up…

“He took my bike, Steve. He took my bike and drove it out into the desert. He covered it up with sand, but the way the wind’s blowing… it’s out in the desert a mile or so east of the RV I told you about and north of the road. You might see it, if the sun’s still up.”

He swallowed.

“Call the cops—the state cops. Tell them I’ve been grabbed by a cop who’s blond and huge—I mean, this guy’s a fucking giant. Have you got that.”

Nothing from the phone but windy silence with an occasional burst of static knifing through it.

“Steve! Steve, are you there.”

No. He wasn’t.

There was only one transmission-bar showing in the phone’s display window now, and no one was there. He had lost the connection, and he’d been concentrating so hard on what he was saying that he had no idea when it had happened, or how much Steve might have heard.

Johnny, are you sure you got through to him at all.

That was Terry’s voice, a voice he sometimes loved and sometimes hated. Now he hated it. Hated it worse than any voice he had ever heard in his life, it seemed. Hated it even worse for the sympathy he heard in it.

Are you sure you didn ‘tjust imagine the whole thing.

“No, he was there, he was there, sonofabitch was there,” Johnny said. He heard the pleading quality in his own voice and hated that, too. “He was, you bitch. For a few seconds, at least.”

Now the cop was only fifty yards away. Johnny shoved the antenna down with the heel of his left hand, flipped the mouthpiece closed, and tried to drop the phone back into his right pocket. The flap was closed. The phone fell into his lap, then bounced to the floor.

He felt around frantically for it, at first finding nothing but crumpled papers—DARE anti-drug handouts, for the most part—and hamburger wrappers coated with ancient grease. His fin-gers closed on something narrow, not what he wanted, but even the brief glance he gave it before tossing it away chilled him. It was a little girl’s plastic barrette.

Never mind it, you’ve got no time to think about what a kid might’ve been doing in the back of his car. Find your damn phone, he must almost be here—Yes. Almost. He could hear the crunch-scuffle of the big cop’s boots even over the wind, which had now grown strong enough to rock the cruiser on its springs when it gusted.

Johnny’s hand found a nest of styrofoam coffee cups, and, amid them, his phone. He seized it, dropped it in his jacket pocket, and pushed the snap closed. When he sat up again, the cop was coming around the front of the car, bent over at the waist so he could peer through the wind-shield. His face was more sunburned than ever, almost blistered in places. In fact, his lower lip actually was blis-tered, Johnny saw, and there was another blistery spot at his right temple.

Good. That doesn’t cross my eyes in the slightest.

The cop opened the driver’s-side door, leaned in, and stared through the mesh between the front seat and the back. His nostrils flared as he sniffed. To Johnny, each one of them looked roughly the size of a bowling alley.

“Did you puke in the back of my cruiser, Lord Jim. Because if you did, the first thing you’re gonna get when we hit town is a big old spoon.”

“No,” Johnny said. He could feel fresh blood trickling down his throat and his voice was fogging up again. “I dry-heaved, but I didn’t puke.” He was actually relieved by what the cop had said. The first thing you’re gonna get when we hit town indicated that he didn’t intend to drag him out of the car, blow his brains out, and bury him next to his scoot.

Unless he’s trying to lull me. Soothe me down, make it easier for him to do… well, to do whatever.

“You scared.” the cop inquired, still leaning in and looking through the mesh. “Tell me the truth, Lord Jimmy, I’ll know a lie. Tak!”

“Of course I’m scared.” “Course” came out “gorse,” as if he had a bad cold.

“Good.” He dropped behind the wheel, took off the hat, looked at it. “Doesn’t fit,” he said. “Folk-singing bitch ruined the one that did. Never sang ‘Leavin’ on a Fucking Jet Plane,’ either.”

“Too bad,” Johnny said, not having the slightest idea what the cop was talking about.

“Lips which lie are best kept silent,” the cop said, tossing the hat that wasn’t his over into the passenger seat. It landed on a tangle of meshy stuff that appeared studded with spikes.

The seat, bowed into a tired curve by the cop’s weight, settled against Johnny’s left knee, squeezing it.

“Sit up!” Johnny yelled. “You’re crushing my leg! Sit up and let me pull it out! Jesus, you’re killing me!”

The cop made no reply and the pressure on Johnny’s already outraged left leg increased.

He seized it in both hands and tore ii free of the sagging seat-back with an indrawn hiss of effort that pulled blood down his throat and started him dry-heaving for real.

“Bastard!” Johnny yelled, the word popping out in a red-misted coughing spasm before he could pull it back. The cop seemed not to notice that, either. He sat with his head lowered and his fingers tapping lightly on the wheel. His breath was wheezing in his throat, and for a moment Johnny wondered if the man was mocking him. He didn’t think so. I hope it’s asthma, he thought. And I hope you choke on it.

“Listen,” he said, allowing none of that sentiment to enter his voice, “I need something for my dose… nose. It’s killing me. Even an aspirin. Do you have an aspirin.”

The cop said nothing. Went on tapping the wheel with his head down, that was all.

Johnny opened his mouth to say something else, then closed it again. He was in terrible pain, all right, the worst he could remember, even worse than the gallstone he had passed in ‘89, but he still didn’t want to die. And some-thing in the cop’s posture, as if he were very far away in his own head, deciding something important, suggested that death might be close.

So he kept silent and waited.

Time spun out. The shadows of the mountains grew a bit thicker and moved a bit closer, but the coyotes had fallen silent. The cop sat with his head lowered and his fingers tapping the sides of the wheel, seeming to meditate, not looking up when another semi went by headed east and a car passed them going west, swinging out to give the parked police-cruiser with the ticking roof—flashers a wide berth.

Then he picked up something which had been lying beside him on the front seat: an old—fashioned shotgun with a double-trigger setup. The cop looked at it fixedly. “I guess that woman wasn’t really a folk-singer,” he said, “but she tried her best to kill me, no doubt about that. With this.”

Johnny said nothing, only waited. His heart was beating slowly but very hard in his chest.

“You have never written a truly spiritual novel,” the cop told him. He spoke slowly, enunciating each word—with care. “It is your great unrecognized failing, and it is at the center of your petulant, self-indulgent behavior. You have no interest in your spiritual nature. You mock the God who created you, and by doing so you mortify your own pneuma and glorify the mud which is your sarx Do you understand me.”

Johnny opened his mouth, then closed it again. To speak or not to speak, that was the question.

The cop solved the dilemma for him. Without looking up from the wheel, without so much as a glance into the rearview mirror, he placed the double barrels of the shot gun on his right shoulder and pointed them back through the wire mesh. Johnny moved instinctively, sliding to the left, trying to get away from those huge dark holes.

And although the cop still did not look up, the muzzles of the gun tracked him as precisely as a radar-controlled servomotor.

He might have a mirror in his lap, Johnny thought, and then: But what good would that do. He wouldn’t see any—thing but the roof of the fucking car. What in the hell is going on here.

“Answer me,” the cop said. His voice was dark and brooding. His head was still bent.

The hand not holding the shotgun continued to tap at the wheel, and another gust of wind hammered the cruiser, driving sand and alkali dust against the window in a fine spray.

“Answer me now. I won’t wait. I don’t have to wait. There s always another one coming along. So… do you under stand what I just told you.”

“Yes,” Johnny said in a trembling voice. “Pneuma is the old Gnostic word for spirit. Sarx is the body. You said, correct me if I’m wrong—” Just not with the shotgun, please don’t correct me with the shotgun “—that I’ve ignored my spirit in favor of my body. And you could be right. You could very well be.”

He moved to the right again. The shotgun muzzles tracked his movements precisely, although he could swear that the springs of the back seat made no sound beneath him and the cop could not see him unless he was using a television monitor or something.

“Don’t toady to me,” the cop said wearily. “That will only make your fate worse.”

“1…” He licked his lips. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

“Sarx is not the body; soma is the body. Sarx is the flesh of the body. The body is made of flesh—as the word was reputedly made flesh by the birth of Jesus Christ—but the body is more than the flesh that makes it. The sum is greater than the parts. Is that so hard for an intellectual such as yourself to understand.”

The shotgun barrel, moving and moving. Tracking like an autogyro.

“I… I never…

“Thought of it that way. Oh please. Even a spiritual na—like you must understand that a chicken dinner is not a chicken. Pneuma… soma… and s-s-s.-”

His voice had thickened and now he was hitching in breath, trying to talk as a person does only when trying to finish his thought before the sneeze arrives. He abruptly dropped the shotgun onto the seat again, gasped in a deep breath (the abused seat creaked backward, almost pinning Johnny’s left knee again), and let fly. What came out of his mouth and nose was not mucus but blood and red filmy stuff that looked like nylon mesh.

This stuff—raw tissue from the big cop’s throat and sinuses—hit the windshield, the steering wheel, the dashboard. The smell was awful, the smell of rotted meat.

Johnny clapped his hands to his face and screamed. There was no way not to scream. He could feel his eye-balls pulsing in their sockets, could feel adrenaline roar into his system as the shock-reaction set in.

“Gosh, there’s nothing worse than a summer cold, is there.” the cop asked in his dark, musing voice. He cleared his throat and spat a clot the size of a crabapple onto the face of the dashboard. It hung where it was for a moment, then oozed down the front of the police-radio like an unspeakable snail, leaving a trail of blood behind.

It hung briefly from the bottom of the radio, then dropped 2 to the floormat with a plop.

Johnny closed his eyes behind his hands and moaned.

“That was sarx, the cop said, and started the engine. “You might want to keep it in mind.

I’d say ‘for your next book,’ but don’t think there’s going to be a next book, do you, Mr.

Marinville.”

Johnny didn’t answer, only kept his hands over his face and his eyes closed. It occurred to him that quite possibly none of this was happening, that he was in a nuthouse some—place, having the world’s ugliest hal]ucination. But his better, deeper mind knew that wasn’t true. The stench of what the man had sneezed out—He’s dying, he’s got to he dying, that’s infection and internal bleeding, he’s sick, his mental illness is only one symptom of something else, some radiation thing, or maybe rabies, or… or…

The cop hauled the Caprice cruiser around in a U, pointing it east. Johnny kept his hands over his face a little longer, trying to get himself under control, then low-ered them and opened his eyes. What he saw out the right—hand window made his jaw drop.

Coyotes sat along the roadside at fifty-foot intervals like an honor guard—silent, yellow—eyed, tongues lolling. They appeared to be grinning.

He turned and looked out the other window, and here were more of them, sitting in the dust, in the blazing sun of late afternoon, watching the police-cruiser go by. Is that a symptom, too. he asked himself. What you’re see-ing out there, is that a symptom, too.

so, how come I can see it.

He looked out the cruiser’s back window. The coyotes were peeling away as soon as they passed, he saw, loping off into the desert.

“You’ll learn, Lord Jim,” the cop said, and Johnny turned back toward him. He saw gray eyes staring from the rearview mirror. One was filmed with blood. “Before your time is up, I think you’ll understand a great deal more than you do now.”

Ahead was a sign by the side of the road, an arrow pointing the way toward some little town or other. The cop put on his turnhlinker, although there was no one to see it.

“I’m taking you to the classroom,” the big cop said.

“School will be in shortly.”

He made the right turn, the cruiser lifting onto two wheels and then settling hack. It headed south, toward the cracked bulwark ot—the open-pit mine and the town huddled at its base.

Steve Ames was breaking one of the Five Com-mandments—the last one on the list, as a matter of fact.

The Five Commandments had been given to him a month ago, not by God but by Bill Harris. They had been sitting in Jack Appleton’s office. Appleton had been Johnny Marinville’s editor for the last ten years. He was present for the handing down of the commandments but did not participate in this part of the conversation until near the end—only sat back in his desk chair with his exquisitely manicured fingers spread on the lapels of his suitcoat. The great man himself had left fiFteen minutes before, head up and studly gray hair flying out behind him, saying he had promised to join someone at an afl gallery down in SoHo.

“All these commandments are thou shalt nots, and I don’t expect you to have any trouble remembering them,” Harris had said. He was a tubby little guy, and there probably wasn’t much harm in him, but everything he said came out sounding like the decree of a weak king. “Are you listenin—.”

“Listening,” Steve had agreed.

“First, thou shalt not drink with him. He’s been on the wagon for awhile—five years, he claims—but he’s stopped going to Alcoholics Anonymous. and that’s not a good sign.

Also, for Johnny the wagon’s always had a nonstick surface, even with AA. But he doesn’t like to drink alone, so if he asks you to join him for a few after a hard day on the old Harley, you say no. If he starts bullying you, telling you it’s part of your job, you still say no.

“Not a problem,” Steve had said.

Harris ignored this. He had his speech, and he intended to stick to it.

“Second, thou shalt not score drugs for him. Not so much as a single joint.

“Third, thou shalt not score women for him… and he’s apt to ask you, particularly if some good-looking babes show up at the receptions I’m setting up for him along the way.

As with the booze and the drugs, if he scores on his own, that’s one thing. But don’t help him.”

Steve had thought of telling Harris that he wasn’t a pimp, that Harris must have confused him with his own father, and decided that would be fairly imprudent. He opted for silence instead.

“Fourth, thou shalt not cover up for him. If he starts boozing or drugging—particularly if you have reason to think he’s doing coke again—get in touch with me at once. Do you understand. At once.

“1 understand,” Steve replied, and he had, but that didn’t mean he would necessarily comply. He had de-cided he wanted this gig in spite of the problems it pre-sented—in part because of the problems it presented; life without problems was a fairly uninteresting proposition—but that didn’t mean he was going to sell his soul to keep it, especially not to a suit with a big gut and the voice of an overgrown kid who has spent too much of his adult life trying to get some payback for real or imagined slights he had suffered in the elementary-school playground. And although John Marinville was a bit of an asshole, Steve didn’t hold that against him. Harris, though… Harris was in a whole other league.

Appleton had leaned forward at this point, making his lone contribution to the discussion before Marinville’s agent could get to the final commandment.

“What’s your impression of Johnny.” he asked Steve. “He’s fifty-six years old, you know, and he’s put a lot of hard mileage on the original equipment. Especially in the eighties. He wound up in the emergency room three dif-ferent times, twice in Connecticut and once down here. The first two were drug ODs. I’m not telling tales out of school, because all that’s been reported—exhaustively—in the press. The last OflC may have been a suicide attempt, and that is a tale out of school. I’d ask you to keep it to yourself.”

Steve had nodded.

“So what do you think.” Appleton asked. “Can he really drive almost half a ton of motorcycle cross-country from Connecticut to California, and do twenty or so read-ings and receptions along the way. I want to know what you think, Mr. Ames, because I’m frankly doubtful.”

He had expected Harris to come busting in then, touting the legendary strength and iron balls of his client—Steve knew suits, he knew agents, and Harris was both—but Harris was silent, just looking at him. Maybe he wasn’t so stupid after all, Steve thought. Maybe he even cared a little for this particular client.

“You guys know him a lot better than I do,” he said. “Hell, I only met him for the first time two weeks ago and I’ve never read one of his books.”

Harris’s face said that last didn’t surprise him at all.

“Precisely why I’m asking you,” Appleton replied. “We have known him for a long time.

Me since 1985, when he used to party with the Beautiful People at 54, Bill since 1965.

He’s the literary world’s Jerry Garcia.”

“That’s unfair,” Harris said stiffly.

Appleton shrugged. “New eyes see clear, my grand—mother used to say. So tell me, Mr.

Ames. do you think he can do it.”

Steve had seen the question was serious, maybe even vital, and thought it over for almost a full minute. The two other men sat and let him.

“Well,” he had said at last, “I don’t know if he can just eat the cheese and stay away from the wine at the recep-tions, but make it across to California on the bike. Yeah, probably.

He looks fairly strong. A lot better than Jerry Garcia did near the end, I’ll tell you that.

I’ve worked with a lot of rockers half his age who don’t look as good.”

Appleton had looked dubious.

“Mostly, though, it’s a look he gets on his face. He wants to do this. He wants to get out on the road, kick some ass, take down some names. And…” Steve had found himself thinking of his favorite movie, one he watched on tape every year or so: Hombre, with Paul Newman and Richard Boone. He had smiled a little. “And he looks like a man who’s still got a lot of hard bark left on him.”

“Ah.” Appleton had looked downright mystified at that. Steve hadn’t been much surprised. If Appleton had ever come equipped with hard bark, Steve thought it had probably all rubbed off by the time he was a sophomore at Exeter or Choate or wherever he’d gone to wear his blazers and rep ties.

Harris had cleared his throat. “If we’ve got that out of the way, the final commandment—”

Appleton groaned. Harris went on looking at Steve, pretending not to hear.

“The fifth and final commandment,” he had repeated. “Thou shalt not pick up hitchhikers in thy truck. Neither male nor female shalt thou pick them up, but especially not female.”

Which was probably why Steve Ames never hesitated when he saw the girl standing beside the road just outside Ely—the skinny girl with her nose bent and her hair dyed two different colors. He just pulled over and stopped.

She opened the door but didn’t get into the cab at first, just looked up at him from across the map-littered seat with wide blue eyes. “Are you a nice person.” she asked.

Steve thought this over, then nodded. “Yeah, I guess so,” he said. “I like a cigar two or three times a day, but I never kicked a dog that wasn’t bigger’n me, and I send money home to my momma once every six weeks.”

“You’re not going to try to slap the make on me, or anything.”

“Nope,” Steve said, amused. He liked the way her wide blue eyes remained fixed on his face. She looked like a little kid studying the funnypages. “I’m fairly well under control in that regard.”

“And you’re not like a crazy serial killer, or anything.”

“No, but Jesus Christ, do you think I’d tell you if I was.”

“I’d prob’ly see it in your eyes,” the skinny girl with the tu-tone hair told him, and although she sounded grave enough, she was smiling a little. “I got a psychic streak. It ain’t wide, but it’s there, buddy. It’s really really there.”

Arefrigerator truck roared past, the guy laying on his horn all the way by, even though Steve had squeezed over until the stubby Ryder was mostly on the shoulder, and the road itself was empty in both directions. No big sur-prise about that, though. In Steve’s experience, some guys simply couldn’t keep their hands off their horns or their dicks.

They were always honking one or the other.

“Enough with the questionnaire, lady. Do you want a ride or not. I’ve got to roll my wheels.” In truth, he was a lot closer to the boss than the boss would maybe approve of. Marinville liked the idea of being on his own in America, Mr. Free Bird, have pen will travel, and Steve thought that was just how he’d write his book. That was fine, too—great, totally cool. But he, Steven Andrew Ames of Lubbock, also had a job to do; his was to make sure Marinville didn’t have to write the book on a Ouija board instead of his word processor. His view on how to accomplish that end was simplicity itself: stay close and let no situation get out of hand unless it absolutely couldn’t be helped. He was seventy miles back instead of a hundred and fifty, but what the boss didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.

“You’ll do, I guess,” she said, hopped up into the cab, and slammed the door shut.

“Well, thank you, cookie,” he said. “I’m touched by your trust.” He checked the rearview mirror, saw nothing but the ass end of Ely, and got back out on the road again.

“Don’t call me that,” she said. “It’s sexist.”

“Cookie is sexist. Oh please.”

In a prim little no-nonsense voice she said: “Don’t call me cookie and I won’t call you cake.”

He burst out laughing. She probably wouldn’t like it, but he couldn’t help it. That was the way laughing was, sort of like farting, sometimes you could hold it in but a lot of times you couldn’t.

He glanced at her and saw that she was laughing a little too—and slipping her backpack off—so maybe that was all right. He put her at about five-six and skinny as a rail—a hundred pounds max, and probably more like ninety-five. She was wearing a tank-top with torn-off sleeves. It gave an awfully generous view of her breasts for a girl worried about meeting Ted Bundy in a Ryder van. Not that she had a lot to worry about up there; Steve guessed she could still shop in the training-bra section at Wal-Mart, if she wanted to. On the front of the shirt, a black guy with dreadlocks grinned from the middle of a blue-green psychedelic sunburst.

Bent around his head like a halo were the words NOT GONNA GIVE IT LIP!

“You must like Peter Tosh,” she said. “It can’t be my tits.”