Stephen King – Desperation

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.”

“I worked with Peter Tosh once,” he replied.

“No way!”

“Way,” he said. He glanced in the rearview and saw that Ely was already gone. It was spooky, how fast that happened out here. He supposed that if he were a young female hitchhiker, he might ask a question or two himself before hopping willy-nilly into someone’s car or truck. It might not help, but it sure couldn’t hurt. Because once you were out in the desert, anything could happen to you.

“When did you work with Peter Tosh?”

“1980 or ‘81,” he said. “I can’t remember which.MadisonSquareGarden , then inForest Hills . Dylan played the encore with him atForest Hills . ‘Blowin in the Wind,’ if you can believe that.”

She was looking at him with frank amazement, unmixed

—so far as he could tell—with doubt. “Whoa, cool! What were you, a roadie?”

“Then, yeah. Later on I was a guitar tech. Now, I’m Yes, that was a good start, but just what was he now? Not a guitar tech, that was for sure. Sort of demoted to roadie again.

Also part-time shrink. Also sort of like Mary Poppins, only with long brown hippie hair that was starting to show some gray along the center part. “Now I’m into something else.

What’s your name?”

“Cynthia Smith,” she said, and held out a hand.

He shook it. Her hand was long, feather-light inside of his, and incredibly fine-boned. It was a little like shaking hands with a bird. “I’m Steve Ames.”

“FromTexas .”

“Yeah,Lubbock . Guess you heard the accent before, huh?”

“Once or twice.” Her gamine grin lit up her whole face. “You can take the boy out ofTexas , but—”

He joined her for the rest of it and they grinned at each other, already friends—the way people can become friends, for a little while, when they happen to meet on American back roads that go through the lonely places.

Cynthia Smith was clearly a flake, but Steve was a veteran flake himself, you couldn’t spend most of your adult life in the music business without succumbing to flakedom, and it didn’t bother him. She told him she had every reason to be careful of guys; one had nearly torn off her left ear and another had broken her nose not so long ago. “And the one who did the ear was a guy I liked,” she added. “I’m sensitive about the ear. The nose, I think the nose has character, but I’m sensitive about the ear, God knows why.”

He glanced across at her ear. “Well, it’s a little flat on top, I guess, but so what? If you’re really sensitive about it, you could grow your hair out and cover it up, you know.”

“Not happening,” she said firmly, and fluffed her hair leaning briefly to the right so she could get a look at her self in the mirror mounted on her side of the cab. The half on Steve’s side was green; the other half was orange. “My friend Gert says I look like Little Orphan Annie from hell That’s too cool to change.”

“Not gonna give them curls up, huh?”

She smiled, patted the front of her shirt, and lapsed into a passable Jamaican imitation. “I go my own way—just like Peter, mon!”

Cynthia Smith’s way had been to leave home and her parents’ more or less constant disapproval at the age of seventeen. She had spent a little time on the East Coast (“I left when I realized I was gettin to be a mercy-fuck,” she said matter-of-factly), and then had drifted back as far as the Midwest, where she had

gotten “sort of clean” and met a good-looking guy at an AA meeting. The good- looking guy had claimed to be entirely clean, but he had lied. Oh boy, had he lied. Cynthia had moved in with him just the same, a mistake (“I’ve never been what you’d call bright about men,” she told Steve in that same matter-of- fact voice). The good-looking guy had come home one night fucked up on crystal meth and had apparently decided he wanted Cynthia’s left ear as a bookmark. She had gone to a shelter, gotten a little more than sort of clean, even worked as a counsellor for awhile after the woman in charge had been murdered and it looked as if the place might close. “The guy who murdered Anna is the same guy who broke my nose,”

she said. “He was bad. Richie—the guy who wanted my ear for a bookmark—he only had a bad temper.Norman was bad. As in crazy.”

“They catch him?”

Cynthia solemnly shook her head. “Anyway, we couldn’t let D & S go under just because one guy went crazy when his wife left him, so we all pitched in to save it. We did, too.”

“D & S?”

“Stands for Daughters and Sisters. I got a lot of my confidence back while I was there.”

She was looking out the window at the passing desert and rubbing the ball of her thumb pensively along the bent bridge of her nose. “In a way, even the guy who did this helped me with that.”

“Norman.”

“Yep, Norman Daniels, that was his name. At least me and Gert—she’s my pal, the onewho says I look like Orphan Annie—stood up to him, you know?”

“Uh-huh..”

“So last month I finally wrote home to my folks. I put my return address on the letter, too. I thought when they wrote back, if they ever did, they’d be righteously pissed—my dad, especially. He used to be a minister. He’s retired now, but..

“You can take the boy out of the hellfire, but you can’t take the hellfire out of the boy,”

Steve said.

She smiled. “Well, that’s sorta what I expected, but the letter I got back was pretty great. I called them.

We talked. My dad cried.” She said this with a touch of wonder. “I mean, he cried. Can you believe that?”

“Hey, I toured for eight months with Black Sabbath Steve said. “I can believe anything. So you’re going home, huh? Return of the Prodigal Cookie?” She gave him a look. He gave her a grin. “Sorry.”

“Yeah, sure you are. Anyway, that’s close.”

“Where’s home?”

“Bakersfield. Which reminds me, how far are you going?”

‘San Francisco. But—”

She grinned. “Are you kidding? That’s so cool!”

“But I can’t promise to take you that far. In fact, I can’t absolutely promise to take you any farther thanAustin — the one inNevada , you know, not the one inTexas .”

“I know whereAustin is, I’ve got a map,” she said, and now she was giving him a stupidbig- brother look that he liked even better than her wide-eyed Miss Prim gaze. She was a cutie, all right.., and wouldn’t she just love it if he told her that?

“I’ll take you as far as I can, but this gig is a little weird. I mean, all gigs are kind of weird, show-business is weird by. nature, and this is showbiz … I guess, anyway but. . . I mean. .

He stopped. What did he mean, exactly? His span of employment as a writer’s roadie (an ill-fitting title, you didn’t have to be a writer yourself to know that, but the only one he could think of) was almost over, and he still didn’t know what to think of it, or of Johnny

Marinville himself. All he knew for sure was that the great man hadn’t asked Steve to score him any dope or women, and that he’d never answered Steve’s knock on his hotel room door with whiskey on his breath. For now that was enough. He could think about how he was going to describe it on his résumé later.

“What is the gig?” she asked. “I mean, this doesn’t look big enough to be a band truck.

Are you touring with a folkie this time? Gordon Lightfoot, someone like that?”

Steve grinned. “My guy is sort of a folkie, I guess, only he plays his mouth instead of a guitar or a harmonica. He—”