He walked back toward the center of the room, head down, picking up shells as he went.
The first two he loaded into the gun; the rest he stuffed absently into his pockets. David dared wait no longer. He bent, snaked his hand between the two bars on the left side of the cell, and grabbed the fat green tube. He slipped it into the pocket of his jeans. The woman named Mary didn’t see; she was still lying on the bunk with her face buried in her arms, sobbing. His parents didn’t see; they were standing at the bars of their cell, arms around each other’s waist, watch-ing the man in the khaki uniform with horrified fascination. David turned around and saw that old Mr. White Hair—Tom—still had his hands to his face, so maybe that was okay, too. Except old Tom’s watery eyes were open behind his fingers, David could see them, so maybe it wasn’t okay. Either way, it was too late now to take it back. Still facing the man the cop had called Tom, David raised the side of one hand to his mouth in a brief shushing gesture. Old Tom gave no sign that he saw; his eyes, in their own prison, only continued to stare out from between the bars of his fingers.
The cop who had killed Pie picked up the last shell on the floor, took a brief look under the desk, then straightened and snapped the shotgun closed with a single flick of his wrist. David had watched him closely through the picking-up process, trying to get a sense of whether or not the cop was counting the shells. He hadn’t thought so until now. Now the cop was just standing there, back-to, head down. Then he turned and strode back to David’s cell, and the boy felt his stomach turn to lead.
For a moment the cop just stood there looking at him, seeming to pry at him, and David thought: He’s trying to pick my brains the way a burglar tries to pick a lock.
“Are you thinking about God?” the cop asked. “Don’t bother. Out here, God’s country stops at Indian Springs and even Lord Satan don’t step his cloven feet much north of Tonopah. There’s no God in Desperation, baby boy out here there’s only can de lach.”
That seemed to be it. The cop walked out of the room with the shotgun now riding under his arm. There were perhaps five seconds of silence in the holding area, broken only by the muffled sobs of the woman named Mary. David looked at his parents, and they looked back at him. Standing that way, with their
arms around each other, he could see how they must have looked as small children, long before they met each other at Ohio Wes leyan, and this frightened him out of all measure. He would rather have come upon them naked and fucking He wanted to break the silence, couldn’t think how.
Then the cop suddenly sprang back into the room. He had to duck his head to keep from bumping it on the top of the doorway. He was grinning in a mad way that made David think ofGarfield , the comic-strip cat, whenGarfield did his impromptu back-fence vaudeville routines. Which this was, it seemed. There was an old telephone hung on the wall, its beige plastic casing cracked and filthy. The cop snatched it off its hook, held it to his ear, and cried: “Room service! Send me up a room!” He slammed the phone back down and turned his madGarfield grin on his prisoners. “Old Jerry Lewis bit,” he said.
“American critics don’t understand Jerry Lewis, but he’s huge inFrance . I mean he’s a stud.”
He looked at David.
“No God inFrance , either, Trooper. Take it from mat Just Cinzano and escargots and women who don’t shave their armpits.”
He flashed the others with his regard, the grin fading as he did so.
“You people have to stay put,” he said. “I know that you’re scared of me, and maybe you’re right to be scared but you’re locked up for a reason, believe it. This is the only safe place for miles around. There are forces out there you don’t want to even think about. And when tonight comes—” He only looked at them and shook his down in the ground. Neatly folded, the way they had been supposed to fold their hands on their desks back in the second grade. No more bottlecap buildings for those hands. No more water fountain nozzles for those fingers. Down into the dark with them.
It was not terror this thought had called up in his mind and heart but despair, as if the image of Brian’s fingers laced together in his coffin proved that nothing was worth anything, that doing never once in the world stopped dying, that not even kids were exempted from the horror- show that roared on and on behind the peppermint sit-com facade your parents believed in and wanted you to believe in.
Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Ross spoke to him as he stood by the bed, meditating on these things in the shorthand of children. And their silence was all right with David; he liked them just fine, especially Mr.
Ross, who had a sort of interesting crazy streak, but he hadn’t come here to see them. They weren’t the
ones with the food-tubes and breathing machinery that were going to be taken away after the grandparents got a chance to say goodbye.
He had come to see Brian.
David had taken his friend’s hand. It was astoundingly cool and lax in his own, but still alive. You could feel the life in it, running like a motor. He squeezed it gently and whispered, “How you doin, bad boy?”
No response but the sound of the machine that was doing Brian’s breathing for him now that his brain had blown most of its fuses. This machine was at the head of the bed, and it was the biggest. It had a clear plastic tube mounted on one side of it. Inside the tube was some-thing that looked like a white accordion. The sound this machine made was quiet — all the machines were quiet— but the accordion-thing was unsettling, just the same. It made a low, emphatic noise each time it went up. A gasping noise. It was as if part of Brian wasn’t down too deep to feel pain, but that part had been taken out of his body and penned up in the plastic tube, where it was now being hurt even worse. Where it was being pressed to death by the white accordion-thing.
And then there were the eyes.
David felt his eyes drawn back to them again and again. Nobody had told him Brian’s eyes would be open; until just now he hadn’t known your eyes could be open when you were unconscious. Debbie Ross had told him not to be shocked, that Brian didn’t look very nice, but she hadn’t told him about that stuffed-moose stare. Maybe that was all right, though; maybe you could never be pre pared about the really awful things, not at any age.
One of Brian’s eyes was bloodshot, with a huge black pupil that ate up all but the thinnest ring of brown.
The other was clear and the pupil appeared to be normal, but nothing else was normal because there was no sign of his friend in those eyes, none. The boy who had cracked him up by saying Oh shit, the mummy’s after us, let’s all walk a little faster wasn’t here at all . . . unless he was in the plastic tube, at the mercy of the white accordion.
David would look away—at the stitched fishhook ‘cut, at the bandage, at the one waxy ear he could see below the bandage—and then his gaze would wander back to Brian’s open, staring eyes with their mismatched pupils. It was the nothing that drew him, the absence, the gone- ness in those eyes. It was more than wrong. It was … was…Evil, a voice deep in his head whispered. It was like no voice he had ever heard in his thoughts before, a total stranger, and when Debbie Ross’s hand dropped on his shoulder, he’d had to clamp his lips together against a scream.
“The man who did it was drunk,” she said in a husky, tear-clotted voice. Fresh tears were rolling down her cheeks. “He says he doesn’t remember any of it, that he was in a blackout, and do you know the horrible thing Davey? I believe him.”
“Deb—” Mr. Ross began, but Brian’s mom took no notice of him.
“How could God let that man not remember hitting my son with his car?” Her voice had begun to rise.
Ralph Carver had poked his head around the edge of the open door, startled, and a nurse rolling a cart up the hall stopped dead in her tracks. She looked into room 508 with a pair of big blue oh-goodness eyes. “How could God be so merciful to someone who deserves to wake up scream ing with memories of the blood coming out of my son s poor hurt head every night for the rest of his life?”