“Let go!” he screamed. “it’s my job! MINE!”
“No, David,” Johnny said, holding on for dear life. “It’s not.” He tightened his grip across David’s chest with his left hand, wincing as the boy’s heels printed fresh pain on his shins, and let his right hand slide down to the boy’s hip. From there it moved with a good pickpocket’s unobtrusive speed. Johnny took from David what he had been instructed to take.. . and left something, too.
“He can’t take them all and then not let me finish! He can’t do that! He can’t!”
Johnny winced as one of David’s feet connected with his left kneecap. “Steve!”
Steve was staring with horrified fascination at the eagle, which was still twitching and slowly fanning one wing. Its talons were red.
“Steve, goddammit!”
He looked up, as if startled out of a dream. Cynthia was kneeling beside Ralph, feeling for a pulse and crying loudly.
“Steve, come here!” Johnny shouted. “Help me!”
Steve came over and grabbed David, who began to struggle even harder.
“No!” David whipped his head from side to side in a frenzy. “No, it’s my job! It’s mine! He can’t take them all and leave me! Do you hear? HE CAN’T TAKE THEM ALL AND-”
“David! Quit it!”
David stopped struggling and merely hung in Steve’s arms like a puppet with its strings cut. His eyes were red and raw. Johnny thought he had never seen such desolation and loss in a human face.
The motorcycle helmet was lying where Johnny had dropped it when the eagle attacked.
He bent, picked it up, and looked at the boy in Steve’s arms. Steve looked the way Johnny felt-sick, lost, bewildered.
“David-” he began,
“Is God in you?” David asked. “Can you feel him in there, Johnny? Like a hand? Or a fire?”
“Yes,” Johnny said.
“Then you won’t take this wrong.” David spit into his face. It was warm on the skin below Johnny’s eyes, like tears.
Johnny made no effort to wipe away the boy’s spittle. “Listen to me, David. I’m going to tell you something you didn’t learn from your minister or your Bible. For all I know it’s a message from God himself. Are you listening?”
David only looked at him, saying nothing.
“You said ‘God is cruel’ the way a person who’s lived his whole life on Tahiti might say ‘Snow is cold.’
You knew, but you didn’t understand.” He stepped close to David and put his palms on the boy’s cold cheeks. “Do you know how cruel your God can be, David.
How fantastically cruel?”
David waited, saying nothing. Maybe listening, maybe not. Johnny couldn’t tell.
“Sometimes he makes us live.”
Johnny turned, scooped up the flashlight, started down the drift, then turned back once again. “Go to your friend Brian, David. Go to your friend and make him your brother.
Then start telling yourself there was an accident out on the highway, a bad one, a no brain drunk crossed the centerline, the RV you were in rolled over and only you survived.
It happens all the time. Just read the paper.”
“But that’s not the truth!”
“It might as well be. And when you get back to Ohio or Indiana or wherever it is you hang your hat, pray for God to get you over this. To make you well again. As for now, you’re excused.”
“I’ll never say another. . . what? What did you say?”
“I said you’re excused.” Johnny was looking at him fixedly. “Excused early.” He turned his head. “Get him out of here, Steven. Get them all out of here.”
“Boss, what-”
“The tour’s over, Tex. Get them into the truck and up the road. If you want to be safe, I’d get going right now Johnny turned and went jogging down into China Shaft the light bobbing ahead of him into the black. Soon that was gone, too.
He tripped over something in spite of the flash- light, almost went sprawling, and slowed to a walk. The Chinese miners had dropped what stuff they had in their frantic, useless rush to escape, and in the end they had dropped themselves, as well. He walked over a littered landscape of bones, powdering them to dust, and moved the light in a steady triangle-left to right, down to the floor, up to the left again-to keep the landscape clear and current in his mind. He saw that the walls fairly jostled with Chinese characters, as if the survivors of the cave-in had succumbed to a sort of writing mania as death first approached and then overtook them.
In addition to the bones, he saw tin cups, ancient picks with rusty heads and funny short handles, small rusty boxes on straps (what David had called ‘seners, he imagined), rotted clothes, deerskin slippers (they were tiny, slippers for infants, one might have thought), and at least three pairs of wooden shoes.
One of these held the stub of a candle that might have been dipped the year before Abe Lincoln was elected president.
And everywhere, everywhere scattered among the remains, were can tahs: coyotes with spider-tongues, spiders with weird albino ratlings poking from their mouths spread winged bats with obscene baby-tongues (the babies were leering, gnomish). Some depicted nightmarish creatures that had never existed on earth, halfling freaks that made Johnny’s eyes hurt. He could feel the can tahs calling to him, pulling him as the moon pulls at salt water. He had sometimes been pulled in that same way by a sudden craving to take a drink or to gobble a sweet dessert or to lick along the smooth velvet lining of a woman’s mouth with his tongue. The can tahs spoke in tones of madness which he recognized from his own past life: sweetly reasonable voices proposing unspeakable acts. But the can tahs would have no power over him unless he stopped and bent and touched them. If he could avoid that-avoid despair that would come disguised as curiosity-he reckoned he would be all right.
Had Steve gotten them out yet? He’d have to hope so, and hope that Steve could manage to get them a good distance away in his trusty truck before the end came. A hell of a bang was coming. He only had the two bags of ANFO hung around his neck on the knotted drawstrings, but that would be plenty, all they had ever needed. It had seemed wiser not to tell the others that, though. Safer.
Now he could hear the soft groaning sound of which David had spoken: the squall and shift of hornfels, as if the very earth were speaking. Protesting his intrusion. And now he could see a dim zigzag of red light up ahead. Hard to tell how far away in the dark. The smell was stronger, too, and clearer: cold ashes. To his left, a skeleton-probably not Chinese, judging by its size- knelt against the wall as if it had died praying. Abruptly it turned its head and favored Johnny Marinville with its dead, toothy grin.
-Get out while there’s still time. Tak ah wan. Tak ah lah.
Johnny punted the skull as if it were a football. It disintegrated (almost vaporized) into bone-fragments and he hurried on toward the red light, which was coming through a rift in the wall. The hole looked just big enough for him to squeeze through.
He stood outside it, looking into the light, not able to see much from the drift side, hearing David’s voice in his head almost as a trance-subject must hear the voice of the hypnotist who has put him under: At ten minutes past one on the afternoon of September twenty-first, the guys at the face broke through into what they at first thought was a cave…
Johnny tossed the flashlight aside-he wouldn’t need it anymore-and squeezed through the gap. As he passed into the an talc, that murmuring elevator-sound they had heard at the entrance to the drift seemed to fill his head with whispering voices. . . enticing, cajoling, forbidding. All around him, turning the an tak chamber into a fan-tastic hollow column lit in dim scarlet tones, were carved stone faces: wolf and coyote, hawk and eagle, rat and scorpion. From the mouth of each protruded not another animal but an amorphous, reptilian shape Johnny could barely bring himself to look at … and could not really see, in any case. Was it Tak? The Tak at the bottom of the mi? Did it matter?
How had it gotten Ripton?
If it was stuck down there, exactly how had it gotten Ripton?
He suddenly realized he was crossing the an tak, walking toward the mi. He tried to stop his legs and discovered he couldn’t. He tried to imagine Cary Ripton making the same discovery and found it was easy.
Easy.
The long bags of ANFO swung back and forth against his chest. Images danced crazily in his mind: Terry grabbing his belt-loops and yanking him tight to her belly as he began to come, the best orgasm of his life and it had gone nowhere but into his pants, tell that one to Ernest Hemingway; coming out of the pool at the Bel-Air, laughing, hair plastered to his forehead, holding up the beer-bottle as the cameras flashed; Bill Harris telling him that going across country on his motorcycle might change his life and his whole career.., if he was really up to it, that was. Last of all he saw the cop’s empty gray eyes staring at him in the rearview mirror, the cop saying he thought Johnny would shortly come to understand a great deal more about pneuma. soma, and sarx than he had previously.