“I won’t go back there,” Johnny said hoarsely. “Not for you, not for Steve Ames or your father, not for Mary, not for the world. I won’t.” He picked up the hammer again and slammed it against the ore-cart, punctuating his refusal. “Do you hear me, David? You’re wasting your time. I won’t go back. Won’t!
Won’t! Won’t!”
“At first I didn’t understand how it could have been you,” David said, as if he hadn’t heard. “It was the Land of the Dead-you even said so, Johnny. But you were alive. That’s what I thought, at least. Even when I saw the scar.” He pointed at Johnny’s wrist. “You died… when7 1966? 1968? I guess it doesn’t matter. When a person stops changing, stops feeling, they die. The times you ye tried to kill yourself since, you were just playing catch up. Weren’t you?” And the child smiled at him with a sympathy that was unspeakable in its innocence and kind ness and lack of judgment.
“Johnny,” David Carver said, “God can raise the dead”
“Oh Jesus, don’t tell me that,” he whispered. “I don want to be raised.” But his voice seemed to reach him from far away, and curiously doubled, as if he were coming apart in some strange but fundamental way. Fracturing like hornfels.
“It’s too late,” David said. “It’s already happened.”
“Fuck you, little hero, I’m going to Austin. Do you hear me? Fucking AUSTIN!”
“Tak will be there ahead of you,” David said. He was still holding out the wallet, the one with the picture of Johnny and David Halberstam and Duffy Pinette standing outside that sleazy little bar, The Viet Cong Lookout. A dive, but it had the best jukebox in the ‘Nam.
A Wurlitzer In his head Johnny could taste Kirin beer and hear the Rascals, the drive of the drums, the organ like a dagger, and how hot it had been, how green and how hot, the sun like thunder, the earth smelling like pussy every time it rained, and that song had seemed to come from every where, every club, every radio, every shithole juke; in a way, that song was Vietnam: I ivasfeelin’ so bad, I asked my family doctor just what I had.
That’s the song that was playing when you died, wasn’t it, Johnny?
“Austin,” he whispered in a feeble, failing voice. And still there was that sense of twinning, that sense of twoness.
“If you leave now, Tak will be waiting for you in a lot of places,” David said, his implacable would-be jailer, still holding out his wallet, the one in which that hateful picture was entombed. “Not just Austin.
Hotel rooms. Speaking halls. Fancy lunches where people talk about books and things. When you’re with a woman, it’ll be you who undresses her and Tak who has sex with her. And the worst thing is that you may live like that for a long time. Can de lach is what you’ll be, heart of the unformed. Mi him can mi. The empty well of the eye.”
I won’t! he tried to scream again, but this time no voice came out, and when he struck at the ore-cart again, the hammer dropped free of his fingers. The strength left his hand. His thighs turned watery and his knees began to unhinge. He slipped onto them with a choked and drowning cry. That sense of doubling.
of twinning, was even stronger now, and he understood with both dismay and resignation that it was a true sensation. He was literally dividing himself in two. There was John Edward Marinville, who didn’t believe in God and didn’t want God to believe in him; that creature wanted to go, and understood that Austin would only be the first stop. And there was Johnny, who wanted to stay. More, who wanted to fight. Who had progressed far enough into this mad supernaturalism to want to die in David’s God, to burn his brain in it, and go out like a moth in the chimney of a kerosene lamp.
Suicide! his heart cried out. Suicide, suicide!
ARVN soldiers, war’s deadeyed optimists, looking for diamonds in assholes. A drunk with a bottle of beer in his hand and his wet hair in his eyes, climbing out of a hotel swimming pool, laughing as the cameras flashed. Terry’s nose bleeding below her hurt, incredulous eyes while a voice from the sky announced that United’s flight 507 to Jacksonville was boarding at Gate B-7. The cop kicking him as he writhed on the centerline of a desert highway.
It makes me furious, the cop had said. It makes me sick with rage.
Johnny felt himself leave his own body, felt himself grasped by hands that were not his own and turned out of his flesh like change from a pocket. He stood ghostlike beside the kneeling man and saw the kneeling man holding his hands out.
“I’ll take it,” the kneeling man said. He was weeping. “I’ll take my wallet, what the fuck, give it back.”
He saw the boy come to the kneeling man and kneel beside him. He saw the kneeling man take the wallet and then put it in the front pocket of the jeans beneath the chaps so he could press his hands together finger-to- finger, as David had done.
“What do I say?” the kneeling man asked, weeping. “Oh David, how do I start, what do I say?”
“What’s in your heart,” the kneeling boy said, and that was when the ghost gave up and rejoined the man. Clarity streaked into the world, lighting it up-lighting him up- like napalm, and he heard Felix
Cavaliere singing I said baby, it’s for sure, I got the fever, you got the cure.
“Help me, God,” Johnny said, raising his hands to a place where they were even with his eyes and he could see them well. “Oh God, please help me. Help me do what I was sent here to do, help me to be whole, help me to live. God, help me to live again.”
I’m going to catch you, bitch! it thought triumphantly.
At first, chances of that had seemed slim. It had gotten within twenty yards of the os pa near the top of the pit- sixty short feet-but the bitch had been able to find a little extra and beat it to the top. Once she started down the other side, Mary had been able to extend her lead in a hurry, from twenty yards to sixty to a hundred and fifty. Because she could breathe deeply, she could cope with her body’s oxygen debt.
Ellen Carver’s body, on the other hand, was rapidly losing the ability to do either. The vaginal bleeding had become a flood, something that would kill the Ellen-body in the next twenty minutes or so anyway.
. . but if Tak was able to catch Mary, it wouldn’t matter how much the remains of Ellen Carver bled; it would have a place to go. But as it came over the rim of the pit, something had ruptured in Ellen’s left lung, as well. Now with every exhale it was not just spraying a fine mist of red but shooting out liquid jets of blood and tissue from both Ellen’s mouth and nose. And it couldn’t get enough fresh oxygen to keep up the chase. Not with just one working lung.
Then, a miracle. Running too fast for the grade and trying to look back over her shoulder at the same time, the bitch’s feet tangled together and she took a spectacular tumble, hitting the gravel surface of the road in a kind of swandive and ploughing downhill for almost ten feet before she came to a stop, leaving a dark drag-mark behind her. She lay face-down with her arms extended, trembling all over. In the starlight her splayed hands looked like pale creatures fished out of a tidepool. Tak saw her try to get a knee under her. It came partway up, then relaxed and slid back again.
Now! Now! Tak ah wan’
Tak forced the Ellen-body into a semblance of a run, gambling on the last of that body’s energy, gambling on its own agility to keep from tripping and falling as the bitch had done. The back-and-forth of its respiration had become a kind of wet chugging in Ellen’s throat, like a piston running in thick grease.
Ellen’s sensory equipment was graying out at the edges, getting ready to shut down. But she would last a little longer. Just a little. And a little was all it would take.
A hundred and forty yards.
A hundred and twenty.
Tak ran at the woman lying in the road, screaming in soundless, hungry triumph as it closed the gap.
Mary could hear something coming, something that was yelling nonsense words in a thick, gargly voice Could hear the thud of shoes on the gravel. Closing in But it all seemed unimportant. Like things heard in a dream. And surely this had to be a dream.. . didn’t it?