What it did was strike the wolf dead center between the eyes.
There was a sound like a brick dropped on an oak plank. The green glare whiffed out of the wolf s eyes they turned into old marbles even as the’ blood began to pour out of the animal’s center-split skull. Then it hit him in the chest, driving him back against the table again, set ting off a brilliant burst of pain in the small of his back For a moment Johnny could smell the wolf-a dry smell almost cinnamony, like the spices the Egyptians had used to preserve the dead. For that moment the animal’s bloody face was turned up ‘to his, the teeth which should by all rights have torn out his throat leering impotently.
Johnny could see its tongue, and an old crescent-shaped scar on its muzzle. Then it dropped on his feet, like something loose and heavy wrapped in a ratty old steamer blanket Gasping, Johnny staggered away from it. He bent to pick up the hammer, then whirled around so clumsily he almost fell, sure that the wolf would be on its feet and coming for him again; there was no way he could have gotten it with the hammer like that, absolutely no way, that baby had been going high, your muscles remembered what it felt like when you’d uncorked one that was going all the way to the backstop, they remembered it very well
But the wolf lay where it had fallen.
Is it time to reconsider David Carver’s God? Terry asked quietly. Stereo Terry now; she had a place in his head, and she also had a place on the wall under you MUST WEAR A HARDHAT.
“No,” he said. “It was a lucky shot, that’s all. Like the one-in-a-thousand at the carny when you actually do win your girlfriend the big stuffed panda-bear.”
Thought you said it was going high.
“Well, I was wrong, wasn’t I? Just like you used to tell me six or a dozen times every fucking day, you great bitch.” He was shocked by the hoarse, almost teary quality of his voice. “Wasn’t that pretty much your refrain 7 throughout the course of our charming union? You’re wrong, Johnny, you’re wrong, Johnny, you’re totally fucking wrong, Johnny?”
You left them, Terry’s voice said, and what stopped him was not the contempt he heard in that voice (which was, after all, only his own voice, his own mind up to its old bicameral tricks) but the despair.
You left them to die. Worse, you continue to deny God even after you called on him.., and he answered.
What kind of man are you?
“A man who knows the difference between God and a free-throw,” he told the woman with the strawberry-blond hair and the bullet-hole in her lab coat. “A man who also knows enough to get while the getting’s good.” He waited for Terry to respond. Terry didn’t. He considered what had just happened a final time, scanning it with his nearly perfect recall, and found nothing but his own arm, which apparently hadn’t forgotten everything it had learned about throwing a fastball, and an ordinary Craftsman hammer. No blue light. No Cecil B. DeMille special effects.
No London Philharmonic swelling with a hundred violins’ worth of phony awe in the background. The terror and emptiness and despair he felt were transitory emotions; they would pass. What he was going to do right now was divorce the ATV from the ore-cart behind it, using the hammer to knock loose the cotter-pin coupling. What he was going to do next was get the ATV running and get the hell out of this creepy little- “Not bad, ace,” said a voice from the doorway.
Johnny wheeled around. The boy was standing there. David. Looking at the wolf. Then he raised his
unsmiling face to Johnny.
“A lucky shot,” Johnny said. “Think that was it?”
“Does your father know you’re out, David?”
“He knows.”
“If you came here to try and persuade me to stay, you’re shit out of luck,” Johnny said.
He bent over the coupling between the ore-cart and the ATV and took a swing at the cotter pin. He missed it completely and smashed his hand painfully against an angle of metal. He cried out and stuck his scraped knuckles into his mouth. Yet he had hit the leaping wolf dead between the eyes with the hammer, he- Johnny blocked the rest. He pulled his hand out of his mouth, tightened his grip on the hammer’s rubber sleeve, and bent over the coupling again. This time he hit it pretty well-not dead center, but close enough to pop the cotter pin free and send it rolling across the floor. It stopped beneath the dangling feet of the woman who looked like Terry.
And I’m not going to read anything into that, either.
“If you came to talk theology, you’re similarly out of luck,” Johnny said. “If, however, you’d like to accompany me west to Austin-”
He broke off. The boy now had something in his hand was holding it out to him. Between them, the dead wolf lay on the lab floor.
“What’s that?” Johnny asked, but he knew. His eyes weren’t that bad yet. Suddenly his mouth felt very dry. Why are you chasing me? he thought suddenly-to what he did not precisely know, only that it wasn’t the kid. Why can’t you lose my scent? Just leave me alone?
“Your wallet,” David said. His eyes on him, so steady “It fell out of your pocket, in the truck. I brought it
to you It’s got all your ID in it, in case you forget who you are “Very funny.”
“I wasn’t joking.”
“So what do you want?” Johnny asked harshly. A reward? Okay. Write down your address, I’ll send you either twenty bucks or an autographed book. Want a base ‘ball signed by Albert Belle? I can do that. Whatever you want. Whatever strikes your fancy.”
David looked down at the wolf for a moment. “Pretty good shot for a man who can’t even hit a coupling dead on from four inches away.”
“Shut up, wiseguy,” Johnny said. “Bring me the wallet if you’re coming. Toss it over if you’re not. Or just keep the goddamn thing.”
“There’s a picture in it. You and two other guys standing in front of a place called The Viet Cong Lookout. A bar, I think.”
“Yeah, a bar,” Johnny agreed. He flexed his hand uneasily on the shaft of the hammer, barely feeling the sting run across his scraped knuckles. “The tall guy in that picture’s David Halberstam. Very famous writer. Histo nan. Baseball fan.”
“I was more interested in the ordinary-sized guy in the middle,” David said, and all at once a part of Johnny-a deep, deep part-knew what the child was driving at, what the child was going to say, and that part moaned in protest.
“The guy in the gray shirt and the Yankees hat. The guy that showed me the China Pit from my Viet Cong Lookout. That guy was you.
“What crap,” Johnny said. “The same kind of crazed crap you’ve been spouting ever since- Softly, perfectly on key, and still holding the wallet out to him on one hand, David Carver sang: “Well I said doctor… Mr. M.D
It was like being slugged square in the middle of the chest. The hammer spilled out of Johnny’s hand.
“Stop it,” he whispered.
“Can you tell me… what’s in me… And he said yeah-yeah-yeah-”
“Stop it!” Johnny screamed, and the radio burped up another burst of static. He could feel stuff starting to move inside him. Terrible stuff. Sliding. Like an avalanche beginning under a surface that only looks solid. Why did the boy have to come? Because he was sent, of course. It wasn’t David’s fault. The real question was why couldn’t the boy’s terrible master let either of them go?
“The Rascals,” David said. “Only back then they were still the Young Rascals. Felix Cavaliere on vocals. Very cool. That’s the song that was playing when you died, wasn’t it, Johnny?”
Images beginning to slide downhill through his mind while Felix Cavaliere sang, I was feelin’ so bad: ARVN soldiers, many no bigger than American sixth-graders, pulling dead buttocks apart, looking for hidden treasure, a nasty scavenger hunt in a nasty war, can tah in can tak; coming back to Terry with a dose in his crotch and a monkey on his back, wanting to score so bad he was half out of his mind, slapping her in an airport concourse when she said something smart about the war (his war, she had called it, as if he had invented the fucking thing), slapping her so hard that her mouth and nose bled, and although the marriage had limped along for another year or so, it had really ended right there in Concourse B of the United terminal at LaGuardia, with the sound of that slap; Entragian kicking him as he lay writhing on Highway 50, not. kicking a literary lion or a National Book Award winner or the only white male writer in America who mattered but just some potbellied geezer in an overpriced motor cycle jacket, one who owed God a death like anyone else, Entragian saying that the proposed title of Johnny’s book made him furious, made him sick with rage.