his hands and scrubbed at his face with them. The gesture made him look his age again, and Johnny was shocked to see how young that was.
“More of them than I ever wanted to have,” David said. “You know what God finally old Job when he got tired of listening to all Job’s complaints?”
“Pretty much told him to fuck off, didn’t he?”
“Yeah. You want to hear something really bad?”
“Can’t wait.”
The ATV was riding over ridges of sand in a series of toothrattling jounces. Johnny could see the edge of town up ahead. He wanted to go faster, but anything beyond second gear seemed imprudent, given the short reach of the headlights. It might be true that they were in God’s hands, but God reputedly helped those who helped them-selves. Maybe that was why he had kept the hammer.
“I have a friend. Brian Ross, his name is. He’s my best friend. Once we made a Parthenon entirely out of bottlecaps.”
“Did you?”
“Uh-huh. Brian’s dad helped us a little, but mostly we did it ourselves. We’d stay up Saturday nights and watch old horror movies. The black-and-white ones? Boris Karloff was our favorite monster.
Frankenstein was good, but we liked The Mummy even better.
We were always going to each other, ‘Oh shit, the mummy’s after us, we better walk a little faster.’
Goofy stuff like that, but fun. You know?”
Johnny smiled and nodded.
“Anyway, Brian was in an accident. A drunk hit him while he was riding to school. I mean, quarter of eight in the morning, and this guy is drunk on his ass. Do you believe that?”
“Sure,” Johnny said, “you bet.”
David gave him a considering look, nodded, then went on. “Brian hit his head. Bad.
Fractured his skull and hurt his brain. He was in a coma, and he wasn’t supposed to live.
But-”
“Let me guess the rest. You prayed to God that your friend would be all right, and two days later, bingo, that boy be walkin n talkin, praise Jesus my lord n savior.”
“You don’t believe it?”
Johnny laughed. “Actually, I do. After what’s happened to me since this afternoon, a little thing like that seems perfectly sane and reasonable.”
“I went to a place that was special to me and Brian to pray. A platform we built in a tree.
We called it the Viet Cong Lookout.”
Johnny looked at him gravely. “You’re not kidding about that?”
David shook his head. “I can’t remember which one of us named it that now, not for sure, but that’s what we called it. We thought it was from some old movie, but if it was, I can’t remember which one.
We had a sign and everything. That was our place, that’s where I went, and what I said was-” He closed his eyes, thinking. “What I said was, ‘God, make him better. If you do, I’ll do something for you. I promise.’ “David opened his eyes again. “He got better almost right away.”
“And now it’s payback time. That’s the bad part, right?”
“No! I don’t mind paying back. Last year I bet my dad five bucks that the Pacers would win the NBA champion-ship, and when they didn’t, he tried to let me off because he said I was just a kid, I bet my heart instead of my head. Maybe he was right-”
“Probably he was right.”
“-but I paid up just the same. Because it’s bush not to pay what you owe, and it’s bush not to do what you promise.” David leaned toward him and lowered his voice … as if he was afraid God might overhear.
“The really bad part is that God knew I’d be coming out here, and he already knew what he wanted me to do. And he knew what I’d have to know to do it. My folks aren’t religious-Christmas and Easter, mostly-and until Brian’s accident, I wasn’t, either. All the Bible I knew was John three-sixteen, on account of it’s always on the signs the zellies hold up at the ballpark. For God so loved the world.”
They were passing the bodega with its fallen sign now. The LP tanks had torn off the side of the building and lay in the desert sixty or seventy yards away. China Pit loomed ahead.
In the starlight it looked like a whited sepulchre.
“What are zellies?”
“Zealots. That’s my friend Reverend Martin’s word. I think he’s .. . I think something may have happened to him.” David fell silent for a moment, staring at the road. Its edges had been blurred by the sandstorm, and out here there were drifts as well as ridges spilled across their path. The ATV took them easily. “Anyway, I didn’t know anything about Jacob and Esau or Joseph’s coat of many colors or Potiphar’s wife until Brian’s accident.
Mostly what I was interested in back in those days”-he spoke, Johnny thought, like a nonagenarian war veteran describing ancient battles and forgotten campaigns-”was whether or not Albert Belle would ever win the American League MVP.”
He turned toward Johnny, his face grave.
“The bad thing isn’t that God would put me in a position where I’d owe him a favor, but that he’d hurt Brian to do it.”
“God is cruel.”
David nodded, and Johnny saw the boy was on the verge of tears. “He sure is. Better than Tak, maybe, but pretty mean, just the same.”
“But God’s cruelty is refining … that’s the rumor, anyway. Yeah?”
“Well. . . maybe.”
“In any case, he’s alive, your friend.”
“Yes-”
“And maybe it wasn’t all about you, anyway. Maybe someday your pal is going to cure AIDS or cancer. Maybe he’ll hit in sixty straight games.”
“Maybe.”
“David, this thing that’s out there-Tak-what is it? Do you have any idea? An Indian spirit? Something like a manitou, or a wendigo?”
“I don’t think so. I think it’s more like a disease than a spirit, or even a demon. The Indians may not have even known it was here, and it was here before they were. Long before. Tak is the ancient one, the unformed heart. And the place where it really is, on the other side of the throat at the bottom of the well .
. . I’m not sure that place is on earth at all, or even in normal space. Tak is a complete outsider, so different from us that we can’t even get our minds around him.”
The boy was shivering a little, and his face looked even paler. Maybe that was just the starlight, but Johnny didn’t like it. “We don’t need to talk about it anymore, if you don’t want to. All right?”
David nodded, then pointed up ahead. “Look, there’s the Ryder van. It’s stopped. They must have found Mary. Isn’t that great?”
“It sure is,” Johnny said. The truck’s headlights were half a mile or so farther on, shining out in a fan toward the base of the embankment. They drove on toward it mostly in silence, each lost in his own thoughts. For Johnny, those questions were mostly concerned with identity; he wasn’t entirely sure who he was any longer. He turned to David, meaning to ask if David knew where there might be a few more sardines hiding hungry as he was, he wouldn’t even turn his nose up at a plate of cold lima beans-when his head suddenly turned into a soundless, brilliant airburst. He jerked backward in the driver’s seat shoulders twisting. A strangled cry escaped him. His mouth was drawn down so radically at the corners that it looked like a clown’s mask. The ATV swerved toward the left side of the road.
David leaned over, grabbed the wheel, and corrected their course just before the vehicle could nose over the edge and tumble into the desert. By then Johnny’s eyes were open again. He braked instinctively, throwing the boy forward. Then they were stopped, the ATV idling in the middle of the road not two hundred feet from the Ryder van’s taillights. They could see people standing back there, red-stained silhouettes, watching them.
“Holy shit,” David breathed. “For a second or two there-”
Johnny looked at him, dazed and amazed, as if seeing him for the first time in his life.
Then his eyes cleared and he laughed shakily.
“Holy shit is right,” he said. His voice was low, almost strengthless-the voice of a man who has just received a walloping shock. “Thanks, David.”
“Was it a God-bomb?”
“What?”
“A big one. Like Saul in Damascus, when the cataracts or whatever they were fell out of his eyes and he could see again. Reverend Martin calls those God-bombs. You just had one, didn’t you?”
All at once he didn’t want to look at David, was afraid of what David might see in his eyes. He looked at the Ryder’s taillights instead.
Steve hadn’t used the extraordinary width of the road to turn around, Johnny noticed; the rental truck was still pointed south, toward the embankment. Of course. Steve Ames was a clever old Texas boy, and he must have suspected this wasn’t finished yet. He was right. David was right, too-they had to go up to the China Pit-but the kid had some other ideas that were maybe not so right.