Time spun out. The shadows of the mountains grew a bit thicker and moved a bit closer, but the coyotes had fallen silent. The cop sat with his head lowered and his fingers tapping the sides of the wheel, seeming to meditate, not looking up when another semi went by headed east and a car passed them going west, swinging out to give the parked police-cruiser with the ticking roof- flashers a wide berth.
Then he picked up something which had been lying beside him on the front seat: an old-fashioned shotgun with a double-trigger setup. The cop looked at it fixedly. “I guess that woman wasn’t really a folk-singer,” he said,
“but she tried her best to kill me, no doubt about that. With this.”
Johnny said nothing, only waited. His heart was beating slowly but very hard in his chest.
“You have never written a truly spiritual novel,” the
cop told him. He spoke slowly, enunciating each word — with care. “It is your great unrecognized failing, and it is at the center of your petulant, self-indulgent behavior. You have no interest in your spiritual nature. You mock the God who created you, and by doing so you mortify your own pneuma and glorify the mud which is your sarx Do you understand me?”
Johnny opened his mouth, then closed it again. To speak or not to speak, that was the question.
The cop solved the dilemma for him. Without looking up from the wheel, without so much as a glance into the rearview mirror, he placed the double barrels of the shot gun on his right shoulder and pointed them back through the wire mesh. Johnny moved instinctively, sliding to the left, trying to get away from those huge dark holes.
And although the cop still did not look up, the muzzles of the gun tracked him as precisely as a radar-controlled servomotor.
He might have a mirror in his lap, Johnny thought, and then: But what good would that do? He wouldn’t see any- thing but the roof of the fucking car. What in the hell is going on here?
“Answer me,” the cop said. His voice was dark and brooding. His head was still bent.
The hand not holding the shotgun continued to tap at the wheel, and another gust of wind hammered the cruiser, driving sand and alkali dust against the window in a fine spray.
“Answer me now. I won’t wait. I don’t have to wait. There s always another one coming along. So …
do you under stand what I just told you?”
“Yes,” Johnny said in a trembling voice. “Pneuma is the old Gnostic word for spirit. Sarx is the body.
You said, correct me if I’m wrong—” Just not with the shotgun, please don’t correct me with the shotgun
“—that I’ve ignored my spirit in favor of my body. And you could be right. You could very well be.”
He moved to the right again. The shotgun muzzles tracked his movements precisely, although he could swear that the springs of the back seat made no sound beneath him and the cop could not see him unless he was using a television monitor or something.
“Don’t toady to me,” the cop said wearily. “That will only make your fate worse.”
“1 .. .“ He licked his lips. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
“Sarx is not the body; soma is the body. Sarx is the flesh of the body. The body is made of flesh—as the word was reputedly made flesh by the birth of Jesus Christ— but the body is more than the flesh that makes it. The sum is greater than the parts. Is that so hard for an intellectual such as yourself to understand?”
The shotgun barrel, moving and moving. Tracking like an autogyro.
“I . . . I never . .
“Thought of it that way? Oh please. Even a spiritual na~like you must understand that a chicken dinner is not a chicken. Pneuma… soma. . . and s-s-s.-—”
His voice had thickened and now he was hitching in breath, trying to talk as a person does only when trying to finish his thought before the sneeze arrives. He abruptly dropped the shotgun onto the seat again, gasped in a deep breath (the abused seat creaked backward, almost pinning Johnny’s left knee again), and let fly. What came out of his mouth and nose was not mucus but blood and red filmy stuff that looked like nylon mesh.
This stuff—raw tissue from the big cop’s throat and sinuses—hit the windshield, the steering wheel, the dashboard. The smell was awful, the smell of rotted meat.
Johnny clapped his hands to his face and screamed. There was no way not to scream. He could feel his eye-balls pulsing in their sockets, could feel adrenaline roar into his system as the shock-reaction set in.
“Gosh, there’s nothing worse than a summer cold, is there?” the cop asked in his dark, musing voice. He cleared his throat and spat a clot the size of a crabapple onto the face of the dashboard. It hung where it was for a moment, then oozed down the front of the police-radio like an unspeakable snail, leaving a trail of blood behind.
It hung briefly from the bottom of the radio, then dropped 2 to the floormat with a plop.
Johnny closed his eyes behind his hands and moaned.
“That was sarx, the cop said, and started the engine. “You might want to keep it in mind.
I’d say ‘for your next book,’ but don’t think there’s going to be a next book, do you, Mr. Marinville?”
Johnny didn’t answer, only kept his hands over his face and his eyes closed. It occurred to him that quite possibly none of this was happening, that he was in a nuthouse someplace, having the world’s ugliest hallucination. But his better, deeper mind knew that wasn’t true. The stench of what the man had sneezed out— He’s dying, he’s got to he dying, that’s infection and internal bleeding, he’s sick, his mental illness is only one symptom of something else, some radiation thing, or maybe rabies, or.. . or…
The cop hauled the Caprice cruiser around in a U, pointing it east. Johnny kept his hands over his face a little longer, trying to get himself under control, then lowered them and opened his eyes. What he saw out the right- hand window made his jaw drop.
Coyotes sat along the roadside at fifty-foot intervals like an honor guard—silent, yellow-eyed, tongues lolling. They appeared to be grinning.
He turned and looked out the other window, and here were more of them, sitting in the dust, in the blazing sun of late afternoon, watching the police-cruiser go by. Is that a symptom, too? he asked himself.
What you’re see-ing out there, is that a symptom, too? So, how come I can see it?
He looked out the cruiser’s back window. The coyotes were peeling away as soon as they passed, he saw, loping off into the desert.
“You’ll learn, Lord Jim,” the cop said, and Johnny turned back toward him. He saw gray eyes staring from the rearview mirror. One was filmed with blood. “Before your time is up, I think you’ll understand a great deal more than you do now.”
Ahead was a sign by the side of the road, an arrow pointing the way toward some little town or other.
The cop put on his turn blinker, although there was no one to see it.
“I’m taking you to the classroom,” the big cop said.
“School will be in shortly.”
He made the right turn, the cruiser lifting onto two wheels and then settling hack. It headed south, toward the cracked bulwark ot~ the open-pit mine and the town huddled at its base.
Steve Ames was breaking one of the Five Commandments—the last one on the list, as a matter of fact.
The Five Commandments had been given to him a month ago, not by God but by Bill Harris. They had been sitting in Jack Appleton’s office.Appleton had been Johnny Marinville’s editor for the last ten years.
He was present for the handing down of the commandments but did not participate in this part of the conversation until near the end—only sat back in his desk chair with his exquisitely manicured fingers spread on the lapels of his suitcoat. The great man himself had left fiFteen minutes before, head up and studly gray hair flying out behind him, saying he had promised to join someone at an AFL gallery down inSoHo .
“All these commandments are thou shalt nots, and I don’t expect you to have any trouble remembering them,” Harris had said. He was a tubby little guy, and there probably wasn’t much harm in him, but everything he said came out sounding like the decree of a weak king. “Are you listenin~?”
“Listening,” Steve had agreed.
“First, thou shalt not drink with him. He’s been on the wagon for awhile—five years, he claims—but he’s stopped going to Alcoholics Anonymous. and that’s not a good sign.