Suppose he means to hurt me? He’s pretty clearly a beer or two short of a sixpack.
Well, he answered himself, suppose he does? What are you going to do about it?
Complain to the local ki-yotes?
His over-trained imagination served up an extremely ugly image: the cop digging a hole in the desert, while in the shade of his cruiser lay the body of a man who had once won the National Book Award and fuckedAmerica ’s most famous actress. He negated the image while it was little more than a sketch, not so much out of fear as by virtue of an odd protective arrogance. Men like him weren’t murdered, after all. They sometimes took their own lives, but they weren’t murdered, especially by i~2 psychotic fans.
That was pulp-fiction bullshit.
There was John Lennon, of course, but— He moved to his saddlebag, catching a whiff of the cop as he went by. For one moment Johnny had a brilliant but unfocused memory of his drunken, abusive, crazily funny father, who had always seemed to smell exactly as this cop did now: Old Spice on top, sweat underneath the aftershave, plain old black-eyed meanness under every thing, like the dirt floor in an old cellar.
Both of the saddlebag’s buckles were undone. Johnny raised the fringed top, aware that he could still smell sweat and Old Spice. The cop was standing right at his shoulder.
Johnny reached for the hanging arm of the poncho, then stopped as he saw what was lying on top of his pile of Triple-A maps. Part of him was shocked, but most of him wasn’t even surprised. He looked at the cop. The cop was looking into the saddlebag.
“Oh, Johnny,” he said regretfully. “This is disappointing. This is très disappointing.”
He reached in and picked up the gallon-sized Baggie lying on the pile of maps. Johnny didn’t have to sniff to know that the stuff inside wasn’t Cherry Blend. Stuck on the front of the Baggie, like someone’s idea of a joke, was a round yellow smile sticker.
“That’s not mine,” Johnny Marinville said. His voice sounded tired and distant, like the message on a very old phone answering machine. “That’s not mine and you know it’s not, don’t you? Because you put it there.”
“Oh yeah, blame the cops,” the big man said, “just like in your pinko-liberal books, right? Man, I smelled the dope the second you got close to me. You reek of it! Tak!”
“Look—” Johnny began.
“Get in the car, pinko! Get in the car, fag!” The voice indignant, the gray eyes full of laughter.
It’s a joke, Johnny thought. Some kind of crazy practical joke.
Then, from somewhere off to the southwest, more howls rose—a tangle of them, this time—and when the cop’s eyes rolled in that direction and he grinned, Johnny felt a scream rising in his throat and had to press his lips together to keep it in. There was no joke in the big cop’s expression as he looked toward that sound; it was the look of a man who is totally insane. And Jesus, he was so fucking big.
“My children of the desert!” the cop said. “The can toi! What music they make!”
He laughed, looked down at the Baggie of dope in his big hand, shook his head, and laughed even harder. Johnny stood watching him, his assurance that men like him were never murdered suddenly gone.
“Travels with Harley,” the cop said. “Do you know what a stupid name for a book that is? What a stupid concept it is? And to plunder the literary legacy of John Steinbeck … a writer whose shoes you aren’t fit to lick … that makes me mad.”
And before Johnny knew what was happening, a huge silver flare of pain went off in his head. He was aware of staggering backward with his hands clapped over his face and hot blood gushing through his fingers, of flailing his arms, of thinking I’m all right, I’m not going to fall over, I’m all right, and then he was lying on his side in the road, screaming up at the blue socket of the sky. The nose under his fingers no longer felt on straight; it seemed to be lying against his left cheek. He had a deviated septum from all the coke he had done in the eighties, and he remembered his doctor telling him he ought to get that fixed before he ran into a sign or a swinging door or something and it just exploded.
Well, it hadn’t been a door or a sign, and it hadn’t exactly exploded, but it had certainly undergone a swift and radical change. He thought these things in what seemed to be perfectly coherent fashion even while his mouth went on screaming.
“In fact, it makes me furious,” the cop said, and kicked him high up on the left thigh. The pain came in a sheet that sank in like acid and turned the big muscles in his leg – to stone. Johnny rolled back and forth, now clutching his leg instead of his nose, scraping his cheek against the asphalt of Highway 50, screaming, gasping, pulling sand down his throat and coughing it harshly back out when he -~ tried to scream again.
“The truth is it makes me sick with rage,” the cop said, and kicked Johnny’s ass, high up toward the small of his back. Now the pain was too enormous to be borne; surely he would pass out. But he didn’t.
He only writhed and crawdaddied on the broken white line, screaming and bleeding from his broken nose and coughing out sand while in the distance coyotes howled at the thickening shadows stretching out
from the distant mountains.
“Get up,” the cop said. “On your feet, Lord Jim.”
“I can’t,” Johnny Marinville sobbed, pulling his legs up to his chest and crossing his arms over his belly, this defensive posture dimly remembered from the ‘68 Democratic Convention inChicago , and from even before that from a lecture he had attended inPhiladelphia , prior to the first Freedom Rides down intoMississippi . He had meant to go along on one of those—not only was it a great cause, it was the stuff of which great fiction was made— — but in the end, something else had come up. Probably his -‘
cock, at the sight of a raised skirt.
“On your feet, you piece of shit. You’re in my house now, the house of the wolf and the scorpion, and you better not forget it.”
“I can’t, you broke my leg, Jesus Christ you hurt me so bad—”
“Your leg’s not broken and you don’t know what being hurt is yet. Now get up.”
“I can’t. I really—”
The gunshot was deafening, the ricochet of the slug off the road a monstrous waspwhine, and Johnny was on his feet even before he was a hundred per cent sure he wasn’t dead. He stood with one foot in the eastbound lane and one in the westbound, drunk-swaying back and forth. The lower half of his face was covered with blood. Sand had stuck in it, making little curls and commas on his lips and cheeks and chin.
“Hey bigshot, you wet your pants,” the cop said.
Johnny looked down and saw he had. No matter how much you jump and dance, he thought. His left thigh throbbed like an infected tooth. His ass was still mostly numb—it felt like a frozen slab of meat. He supposed he should be grateful, all things considered. If the cop had kicked him a little higher that second time, he might have paralyzed him.
“You’re a sorry excuse for a writer, and you’re a sorry excuse for a man,” the cop said.
He was holding a huge revolver in one hand. He looked down at the Baggie of pot, which he still held in the other, and shook his head disgustedly. “I know that not just by what you say, but by the mouth you say it out of. In fact, if I looked at your loose-lipped and self-indulgent mouth for too long at a stretch, I’d kill you right here. I wouldn’t be able to help myself.”
Coyotes howled in the distance, wh-wh-wH0000, like something that belonged in the soundtrack of an old John Wayne movie.
“You did enough,” Johnny said in a foggy, stuffy voice. “Not yet,” the cop said, and smiled. “But the nose is a start. It actually improves your looks. Not much, but a little.”
He opened the back door of his cruiser. As he did, Johnny wondered how long this little comedy had taken. He had absolutely no idea, but not one car or truck had passed while it was going on. Not one.
“Get in, bigshot.”
“Where are you taking me?”
“Where do you think I’d take a self-indulgent pinko-pothead asshole like you? To the old calabozo.
Now get in the car.”