“Sorry, nope, too creepy.” She sounded both apologetic and defiant.
They left the office. Farther down the corridor, in the workroom or lab or whatever it was, The Tractors were still singing about the boogie-woogie girl who had it stacked up to the ceiling and sticking in your face.
How long is that fucking song? Steve wondered. been playing fifteen minutes already, got to ‘ye been.
“Can we go now?” Cynthia asked. “Please?”
He pointed down the hall toward the bright yellow lights.
“Oh Jesus, you’re nuts,” she said, but when he started in that direction, she followed him.
III
“Where are you taking me?” Ellen Carver asked for the third time. She leaned forward, hooking her fingers through the mesh between the cruiser’s front and back seats. “Please, can’t you tell me?”
At first she’d just been thankful not to be raped or killed.., and relieved that, when they got to the foot of the lethal stairs, poor sweet little Kirstie’s body was gone There had been a huge bloodstain on the steps outside the doors, however, still not entirely dry and only partially covered by the blowing sand which had stuck to it. She guessed it had belonged to Mary’s husband. She tried to step over it, but the cop, Entragian, had her arm in a pincers grip and simply pulled her through it, so that her sneakers left three ugly red tracks behind as they went around the corner to the parking lot. Bad. All of it. Horrible.
But she was still alive.
Yes, relief at first, but that had been replaced by a growing sense of dread. For one thing, whatever was happening to this awful man was now speeding up. She could hear little liquid pops as his skin let go in various places, and trickling noises as blood flowed and dripped. The back of his uniform shirt, formerly khaki, was now a muddy red.
And she didn’t like the direction he had taken-south. There was nothing in that direction but the vast bulwark of the open-pit mine.
The cruiser rolled slowly alongMain Street (she assumed it wasMain Street , weren’t they always?).
passing a final pair of businesses: another bar andHarvey ’s Small Engine Repair. The last shop on the street was a somehow sinister little shack with ~ODEGA written above the door and a sign out front which the wind had blown off its stand. Ellen could read it anyway: MEXICAN FOOD’S.
The sun was a declining ball of dusty furnace-fire, and the landscape had a kind of clear daylight darkness about it that struck her as apocalyptic. It wasn’t so much a question of where she was, she realized, as who she was. She couldn’t believe she was the same Ellen Carver who was on the PTA and had been considering a run for school board this fall, the same Ellen Carver who sometimes went out to lunch with friends at China Happiness, where they would all get silly over initials and talk about clothes and kids and marriages-whose was shaky and whose was not. Was she the. Ellen Carver who picked her nicest clothes out of the Boston Proper catalogue and wore Red perfume when she was feeling amorous and had a funny rhinestone tee-shirt that said QUEEN OF THE UNIVERSE? The Ellen Carver who had raised two lovely children and had kept her man when those all about her were losing theirs?
The one who examined her breasts for lumps once every six weeks or so, the one who liked to curl up in the living room on weekend nights with a cup of hot tea and a few chocolates and paperbacks with titles like Misery inParadise ? Really? Oh really? Well, yes, probably; she was those Ellens and a thousand others: Ellen in silk and Ellen in denim and Ellen sitting on the commode and peeing with a recipe for Brown Betty in one hand; she was, she supposed, both her parts and more than her parts, when summed, could account for … but could that possibly mean she was also the Ellen Carver whose well-loved daughter had been murdered and who now sat huddled in the hack of a police-car that was beginning to stink unspeakably, a woman being driven past a fallen sign reading MEXICAN FOOD’S, a woman who would never see her home or friends or husband again? Was she the El]en Carver being driven into a dirty, windy darkness where no one read the Boston Proper catalogue or drank maitais with little paper umbrellas poking out of them and only death awaited’?
“Oh God, please don’t killme. ” she said in a boneless, trembly voice she could not recognize as her own. “Please, sir, don’t kill me, I don’t want to die. I’ll do whatever you say, but don’t kill me. Please don’t.”
He didn’t answer. There was a thump from beneath them as the tar quit. The cop pulled the knob that turned on the headlights, but they didn’t seem to help much; what she saw were two bright cones shining into a world of roiling dust. Every now and then a tumbleweed would fly in front of them, headed east.
Gravel rumbled beneath the tires and pinged against the undercarriage.
They passed a long, ramshackle building with rusty metal sides-a factory or some kind of mill, she thought-and then the road tilted up. They started to climb the embankment.
“Please,” she whispered. “Please, just tell me what you want.”
“Uck,” he said, grimacing, and reached into his mouth like a man who’s got a hair on his tongue. Instead of a hair he pulled out the tongue itself. He looked at it for a moment, lying limply in his fist like a piece of liver, and then tossed it aside.
They passed two pickup trucks, a dumptruck, and a yellow-ghost backhoe. all parked together inside the first Switchback the road made on its way to the top.
“If you’re going to kill me, make it quick,” she said in her trembly voice. “Please don’t hurt me. Do that much, at least, promise you won’t hurt me.”
But the slumped, bleeding figure behind the wheel of the cruiser promised her nothing. It simply drove through the flying dust, guiding the car to the crest of the bulwark. The cop didn’t hesitate at the top hut crossed the rim and started down, leaving the wind above them as he did. Ellen looked back, wanting to see some last light, but she was too late.
The walls of the pit had already hidden what remained of the sunset. The cruiser was descending into a vast lake of darkness, an abyss that made a joke of the headlights.
Down here, night had already fallen.
You’ve had a conversion, Reverend Martin once told David. This was near the beginning. It was also around the time that David began to realize that byfour o’clock on most Sunday afternoons. Reverend Gene Martin was no longer strictly sober. It would still be some months, however, before David realized just how much his new teacher drank. In fact, yours is the only genuine conversion I’ve ever seen, perhaps the only genuine one I’ll ever see. These are not good times for the God of our fathers, David.Lot of people talking the talk, not many walking the walk.
David wasn’t sure that “conversion” was the right word for what had happened to him, but he hadn’t spent much time worrying about it. Something had happened, and just coping with it was enough. The something had brought him to Reverend Martin, and Reverend Martin-drunk or not-had told him things he needed to know and set him tasks that he needed to do. When David had asked him, at one of those
Sunday-afternoon meetings (soundless basketball on the TV that day), what he should be doing, Reverend Martin had responded promptly. “The job of the new Christian is to meet God, to know God, to trust God, to love God. That’s not like taking a list to the supermarket, either, where you can dump stuff into your basket in any order you like. It’s a progression, like working your way up the math ladder from counting to calculus. You’ve met God, and rather spectacularly, too. Now you’ve got to get to know him.”
“Well, I talk to you,” David had said.
“Yes, and you talk to God. You do, don’t you? Haven’t given up on the praying?”
“Nope. Don’t often hear back, though.”
Reverend Martin had laughed and taken a sip from his teacup. “God’s a lousy conversationalist, no question about that, but he left us a user’s manual. I suggest you consult it.”
“Huh?”
“The Bible,” Reverend Martin had said, looking at him over the rim of his cup with bloodshot eyes.
So he had read the Bible, starting in March and finishing Revelation (“The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen”) just a week or so before they had leftOhio . He had done it like homework, twenty pages a night (weekends off), making notes, memorizing stuff that seemed important, skipping only the parts Reverend Martin told him he could skip, mostly the begats. And what he remembered most clearly now, as he stood shivering at the sink in the jail cell, dousing himself with icy water, was the story of Daniel in the lions’ den. King Darius hadn’t really wanted to throw Danny in there, but his advisers had mousetrapped him somehow. David had been amazed at how much of the Bible was politics.