again. Desperately thirsty.
As he came over a gentle rise and throttled down a little, he saw a
small town about two miles ahead, buildings clustered along a highway. A
scattering of trees looked supernaturally lush after the
desolation-physical end spiritual-through which he had traveled for the
past several hours.
Half convinced that the town was only an apparition, he angled toward it
nevertheless.
Suddenly, silhouetted against a sky that was growing purple and red with
the onset of twilight, the spire of a church appeared, a cross at its
pinnacle. Though he realized that he was to some extent delirious and
that his delirium was at least partly related to serious dehydration,
Jim turned at once toward the church. He felt as if he needed the
solace of its interior spaces more than he needed water.
Half a mile from the town, he rode the Harley into an arroyo and left it
there on its side. The soft sand walls of the channel gave way easily
under his hands, and he quickly covered the bike.
He had assumed he could walk the last half mile with relative ease. But
he was worse off than he had realized. His vision swam in and out of
focus.
His lips burned, his tongue stuck to the roof of his dry mouth, and his
throat was sore-as if he were in the grip of a virulent fever.
The muscles in his legs began to cramp and throb, and each foot seemed
to be encased in a concrete boot.
He must have blacked out on his feet, because the next thing he knew, he
was on the brick steps of the white clapboard church, with no
recollection of the last few hundred yards of his journey. The words R
LADY OF THE DESERT Were On a brass plaque beside the double doors.
He had been a Catholic once. In a part of his heart, he still was
Catholic. He had been many things-Methodist, Jew, Buddhist, Baptist,
Moslem, Hindu, Taoist, more-and although he was no longer any them in
practice, he was still all of them in experience.
Though the door seemed to weigh more than the boulder that had covered
the mouth of Christ’s tomb, he managed to pull it open. He went inside.
The church was much cooler than the twilight Mojave, but not really cooL
It smelled of myrrh and spikenard and the slightly sweetish odor of
burning votive candles, causing memories of his Catholic days to flood
back him, making him feel at home.
At the doorway between narthex and nave, he dipped two fingers in
holy-water font and crossed himself He cupped his hands in the liquid,
brought them to his mouth, and drank. The water tasted like blood: He
looked into the white marble basin in horror, certain that it was
brimming with gore, but he saw only water and the dim, shimmering
reflection of his own face.
He realized that his parched and stinging lips were split. He lick
them. The blood was his own.
Then he found himself on his knees at the front of the nave, leaning
against the sanctuary railing, praying, and he did not know how he
gotten there. Must have blacked out again.
The last of the day had blown away as if it were a pale skin of dust, a
hot night wind pressed at the church windows. The only illumination was
from a bulb in the narthex, the flickering flames of half a dozen votive
candles in red-glass containers, and a small spotlight shining down on
the crucifix.
Jim saw that his own face was painted on the figure of Christ.
He blinked his burning eyes and looked again. This time he saw the face
of the dead man in the station wagon. The sacred countenance
metamorphosed into the face of Jim s mother, his father, the child named
Susie, Lisa then it was no face at all, just a black oval, as the
killer’s face had been black oval when he had turned to shoot at Jim
inside the shadow-fill Road king.
Indeed, it wasn’t Christ on the cross now, it was the killer. He open
his eyes, looked at Jim, and smiled. He jerked his feet free of the