It had been buckshot in the gun, not bird. If it had hit the cop in the midsection, it would have torn him apart. Knowing that made Ralph feel even worse.
The big cop threw his weight against the desk and shoved it across the room toward the cell Ralph had decided was the drunk-tank—toward the cell and the woman pressed against the cell’s bars. The chair was penned in the kneehole. It swiveled back and forth, casters squalling. The woman tried to get the gun down between her and the chair before the chair could hit her, but she didn’t move fast enough. The chairback crashed into her hips and pelvis and stomach, driving her backward into the bars. She howled in pain and surprise.
The big cop spread his arms like Samson preparing to pull down the temple and grasped the sides of the desk. Although his ears were still ringing from the shotgun blast, Ralph heard the seams under the arms of the maniac cop’s khaki uniform shirt give way. The cop pulled the desk back. “Drop it!” he yelled.
“Drop the gun, Mary!”
The woman shoved the chair away from her, raised the shotgun, and pulled back the double hammers again. She was sobbing with pain and effort. Out of the corner of his eye, Ralph saw Ellie put her hands over her ears as the dark-haired woman curled her finger around the triggers, but this time there was only a dry click when the hammers fell. Ralph felt disappointment as bitter as gall crowd his throat. He had known just looking at it that the shotgun wasn’t a pump or an auto, and still he had somehow thought it would fire, had absolutely expected it to fire, as if God himself would reload the chambers and perform aWinchester miracle.
The cop shoved the desk forward a second time. If not for the chair, Ralph saw, she would have been safe in the kneehole. But the chair was there, and it slammed into her midsection again, doubling her forward and drawing a harsh retching noise from her.
“Drop it Mary, drop it!” the cop yelled.
But she wouldn’t. As the cop pulled the desk back again (Why doesn’t he just charge her? Ralph thought. (Doesn’t he know the, damned gun is empty?), shells spilling off the top and rolling everywhere, she reversed it so she could grip the twin barrels. Then she leaned for-ward and brought the stock down over the top of the desk like a club. The cop tried to drop his right shoulder, but the burled walnut stock of the gun caught him on the collarbone just the same. He grunted. Ralph had no idea if it was a grunt of surprise, pain, or simple exasperation, but the sound drew a scream of approval from across the room, where David was still standing with his hands wrapped around the bars of the cell he was in. His face was pale and sweaty, his eyes blazing. The old man with the white hair had joined him.
The cop pulled the desk back once more—the blow to his shoulder did not noticeably impair his ability to do this—and slammed it forward again, hitting the woman with the chair and driving her into the bars.
She uttered another harsh cry.
“Put it down!” the cop yelled. It was a funny kind of yell, and for a moment Ralph found himself hoping that the bastard was hurt after all. Then he realized the cop was laughing.
“Put it down or I’ll beat you to a pulp, I really will The dark-haired woman—Mary—raised the gun again, but this time with no conviction.
One side of her shirt had pulled out of her jeans, and Ralph could see bright red marks on the white skin of her waist and belly. He knew that, were she to take the shirt off, he would see the chairback’s silhouette tattooed all the way up to the cups of her bra.
She held the gun in the air for a moment, the inlaid stock wavering, then threw it aside. It clattered across to the cell where David and the white-haired man were. David looked down at it.
“Don’t touch it, son,” the white-haired man said. “it’s empty, just leave it alone.”
The cop glanced at David and the white-haired man. Then, smiling brilliantly, he looked at the woman with her back to the drunk-tank bars. He pulled the desk away from her, went around it, and kicked at the chair. It voyaged across the hardwood on its squeaky casters and thumped to a stop against the empty cell next to Ralph and Ellie. The cop put an arm around the dark-haired woman’s shoulders. He looked at her almost tenderly. She responded with the blackest glance Ralph had ever seen in his life.
“Can you walk?” the cop asked her. “Is anything broken’?”
“What difference does it make?” She spat at him. “Kill me if you’re going to, get it over with.”
“Kill you? Kill you?” He looked stunned, the expression of a man who has never killed anything bigger than a wasp in his whole life. “I’m not going to kill you. Mare!” He hugged her to him briefly, then looked around at Ralph and Ellie, David and the white haired man. “Gosh, no!” he said. “Not when things are just getting interesting.”
The man who had once been on the cover of People and Time and Premiere (when he married the actress with all the emeralds), and the front page of The New York Times (when he won the National Book Award for his novel Delight), and in the center-spread of inside View (when he was arrested for beating up his third wife, the one before the actress with the emeralds), had to take a piss.
He pulled his motorcycle over to the westbound edge of Highway 50, working methodically down through the gears with a stiff left foot, and finally rolling to a stop on the edge of the tar. Good thing there was so little traffic out here, because you couldn’t park your scoot off the road in the Great Basin even if you had once fucked America’s most famous actress (although she had admittedly been a little long in the tooth by then) and been spoken of in connection with the Nobel Prize for Literature. If you tried it, your bike was apt to first heel over on her kickstand and then fall flat on her handlebars.
The shoulder looked hard, but that was mostly attitude—not much different from the attitudes of certain people he could name, including the one he needed a mirror to get a good look at. And try picking up a seven-hundred-pound Harley-Davidson once you’d dumped it, especially when you were fifty-six and out of shape. Just try.
I don’t think so, he thought, looking at the red-and-cream Harley Softail, a street bike at which any purist would have turned up his nose, listening to the engine tick-tock in the silence. The only other sounds were the hot wind and the minute sound of sand spacking against his leather jacket—twelve hundred dollars at Barneys inNew York . A jacket meant to be photographed by a fag from Interview magazine if ever there had been one. I think we’ll skip that part entirely’, shall we?
“Fine by me,” he said. He took off his helmet and put it on the Harley’s seat. Then he rubbed a slow hand down his face, which was as hot as the wind and at least twice as sunburned. He thought he had never felt quite so tired or so out of his element in his whole life.
The Literary Lion walked stiffly into the desert, his long gray hair brushing against the shoulders of his motorcycle jacket, the scrubby mesquite and paintbrush ticking against his leather chaps (also from Barneys). He looked around carefully hut saw nothing coming in either direction. There was something parked off the road a mile or two farther west—a truck or maybe a motor home—but even if there were people in it, he doubted that they could watch the great man take a leak without binoculars. And if they were watching, so what? lt was a trick most people knew, after all.
He unzipped his fly—John Edward Marinville, the man Harper’s had once called “the writer Norman Mailer always wanted to be,” the man Shelby Foote had once called “the only living American writer of John Stein-beck’s stature”—and hauled out his original fountain pen. He had to piss like a racehorse but for almost a minute nothing happened; he just stood there with his dry dick in his hand.
Then, at last, urine arced out and turned the tough and dusty leaves of the mesquite a darker, shiny green.
“Praise Jesus, thank you, Lord!” he bellowed in his rolling, trembling Jimmy Swaggart voice, it was a great success at cocktail parties; Tom Wolfe had once laughed so hard when he was doing the evangelist voice that Johnny thought the man was going to have a stroke. ‘Water in the desert, that’s a big ten-four!