Fix your eyes, Johnny, Terry said. Fix your eyes so you can look at him without a single blink. You know how to do that, don’t you?
Yes, he certainly did. He remembered something an old literature prof of his had said, back when dinosaurs still walked the earth and Ralph Houk still managed the New York Yankees. Lying is fiction, this crusty old reptile had proclaimed with a dry and cynical grin, fiction is art, and therefore all art is a lie.
And now, ladies and gentlemen, stand back as I prepare to practice art on this unsuspecting young prophet.
He turned to David and met David’s concerned gaze with a rueful little smile. “No Godbombs,
David. Sorry to disappoint you.”
“Then what just happened?”
“I had a seizure. Everything just came down on me at once and I had a seizure. As a young man, I used to have one every three or four months. Petit mal. Took medication and they went away. When I started drinking heavily around the age of forty-well, thirty five, and there was a little more involved than just booze, I guess-they came back. Not so petit by then, either. The seizures are the main reason I keep trying to go on the wagon.
What you just saw was the first one in almost”-he paused, pretending to count back-
”eleven months. No booze or cocaine involved this time, either. Just plain old stress.”
He got rolling again. He didn’t want to look around now; if he did he would be looking to see how much of it David was buying, and the kid might pick up on that. It sounded crazy, paranoid, but Johnny knew it wasn’t. The kid was amazing and spooky … like an Old Testament prophet who has just come striding out of an Old Testament desert, skinburned by the sun and brainburned by God’s inside information.
Better to tuck his gaze away, keep it to himself, at least for the time being.
From the corner of his right eye he could see David studying him uncertainly. “Is that really the truth, Johnny?” he asked finally. “No bullshit?”
“Really the truth,” Johnny said, still not looking directly at him. “Zero bullshit.”
David asked no more questions… but he kept glancing over at him. Johnny discovered he could actually feel that glance, like soft, skilled fingers patting their way along the top of a window, feeling for the catch that would unlock it.
Tak sat on the north side of the rim, talons digging into the rotted hide of an old fallen tree. Now literally eagle-eyed, it had no trouble picking out the vehicles below. It could even see the two people in the ATV: the writer behind the wheel, and, next to him, the boy.
The shitting prayboy.
Here after all.
Both of them here after all.
Tak had met the boy briefly in the boy’s vision and had tried to divert him, frighten him, send him away before he could find the one that had summoned him. It hadn’t been able to do it. My God is strong, the boy had said, and that was clearly true.
It remained to be seen, however, if the boy’s God was strong enough.
The ATV stopped short of the yellow truck. The writer and the boy appeared to be talking. The boy’s dama started walking toward them, a rifle in one hand, then stopped as the open vehicle began moving forward again. Then they were together once more, all those who remained, joined again in spite of its efforts.
Yet all was not lost. The eagle’s body wouldn’t last long-an hour, two at the most-but right now it was strong and hot and eager, a honed weapon which Tak grasped in the most intimate way. It ruffled the bird’s wings and rose into the air as the dama embraced his damane. (It was losing its human language rapidly now, the eagle’s small can toi brain incapable of holding it. and reverting back to the simple but powerful tongue of the unformed.)
It turned, glided out over the well of darkness which was the China Pit, turned again, and spiraled down toward the black square of the drift. It landed, uttering a single loud quowwwk! as its talons sorted the scree for a good grip. Thirty yards down the drift, pallid reddish-pink light glowed. Tak looked at this for a moment, letting the light of the an tak fill and soothe the bird’s primitive marble of a brain, then hopped a short distance into the tunnel. Here was a little niche on the left side. The eagle worked its way into it and then stood quiet, wings tightly folded, waiting.
Waiting for all of them, but mostly for Prayboy. It would rip Prayboy’s throat out with one of the golden eagle’s powerful talons, his eyes with the other; Prayboy would be dead before any of them knew what had happened. Before the os dam himself knew what had happened, or even realized he was dying blind.
Steve had brought a blanket-an old faded plaid thing-along to cover the boss’s scoot with in the event that he did end up having to transport the Harley to the West Coast in the back of the truck. When Johnny and David pulled up in the ATV, Mary Jackson had this blanket wrapped around her shoulders like a tartan shawl. The truck’s rear door had been run up and she was sitting there with her feet on the bumper, holding the blanket together in front of her. In her other hand was one of the few remaining bottles of Jolt. She thought she had never tasted anything sweeter in her whole life. Her hair was plastered flat against her head in a sweaty helmet. Her eyes were huge. She was shivering in spite of the blanket, and felt like a refugee in a TV newsclip. Something about a fire or an earthquake. She watched Ralph give his son a fierce one-armed hug, the Ruger .44 in his other hand, actually lifting David up off his feet and then setting him down again.
Mary slid to the ground, and staggered a little. The muscles of her legs were still trembling from her run. I ran for my life, she thought, and that’s something I’ll never be able to explain, not by talking, probably not even in a poem-how it is to run not for a meal or a medal or a prize or to catch a train but for your very fucking life.
Cynthia put a hand on her arm. “You okay?”
“I’ll be fine,” she said. “Give me five years and I’ll be in the goddam pink.”
Steve joined them. “No sign of her,” he said-meaning Ellen, Mary supposed. Then he went over to David and Marinville. “David? All right?”
“Yes,’~ David said. “So’s Johnny.”
Steve looked at the man he had been hired to shepherd, his face noncommittal. “That so?”
“I think so,” Marinville said. “I had.. .“ He glanced at David. “You tell him, cabbage.
You got the head on you.”
David smiled wanly at that. “He had a change of heart. And if it was my mother you were looking for …
the thing that was inside my mother .. . you can stop. She’s dead.”
“You’re sure?”
David pointed. “We’ll find her body about halfway up the embankment.” Then, in a voice which struggled to be matter-of-fact and failed, he added: “I don’t want to look at her. When you move her out of the way, I mean. Dad, I don’t think you should, either.”
Mary walked over to them, rubbing the backs of her thighs, where the ache was the worst. “The Ellen-body is finished, and it couldn’t quite catch me, So it’s stuck in its hole again, isn’t it?”
“Ye-es . .
Mary didn’t like the doubtful sound of David’s voice. There was more guessing than knowing in it.
“Did it have anyone else it could get into?” Steve asked. “Is there anyone else up here? A hermit? An old prospector?”
“No,” David said. More certain now.
“It’s fallen and it can’t get up,” Cynthia said, and pumped her fist at the star-littered sky.
“Yesss!”
“David?” Mary asked.
He turned to her.
“We’re not done, even if it is stuck in there. Are we? We’re supposed to close the drift.”
“First the an tak,” David said, nodding, “then the drift, yeah. Seal it in, like it was before.” He glanced at his father.
Ralph put an arm around him. “If you say so, David.”
“I’m up for it,” Steve said. “I can’t wait to see where this guy takes his shoes off and puts his feet up on the hassock.”
“I was in no particular hurry to get to Bakersfield, anyway,” Cynthia said.
David looked at Mary.
“Of course. It was God that showed me how to get out, you know. And there’s Peter to think about. It killed my husband. I think I owe it a little something for Peter.”