“If you want … that, take me where my son won’t have to see.”
“Don’t worry,” Entragian said in that same low, conspirator’s ~ “I don’t want . . . that. Especially not from.., you. Now come on.
He slammed the cell door shut, giving it a little shake to make sure it was locked, while he held onto David’s mother with the other hand. Then he led her toward the door.
“Mom!” David screamed. He seized the bars and shook them. The cell door rattled a little, but that was all. ‘Mom, no! Leave her alone, you bastard! LEAVE MY MOTHER ALONE!”
“Don’t worry, David, I’ll be back,” she said, but the soft, almost uninflected quality of her voice scared him badly-it was as if she were already gone. Or as if the cop had hypnotized her just by touching her.
“Don’t worry about me.”
“No!” David screamed. “Daddy, make him stop! Make him stop!” In his heart was a growing certainty: if the huge, bloody cop took his mother out of this room, they would never see her again.
“David Ralph took two blundering steps back-ward, sat on the bunk, put his hands over his face, and began to cry.
“I’ll take care of her, Dave, don’t worry,” Entragian said. He was standing by the door to the stairs and holding
Ellen Carver’s arm above the elbow. He wore a grin that would have been resplendent if not for his blood-streaked teeth. “I’m sensitive-a real Bridges of Madison County kind of guy, only without the cameras.”
“If you hurt her, you’ll be sorry,” David said.
The cop’s smile faded. He looked both angry and a little hurt. “Perhaps I will . . . but I doubt it. I really do. You’re a little prayboy, aren’t you?”
David looked at him steadily, saying nothing.
“Yes, yes you are. You’ve just got that prayboy look about you, great-gosh-a’mighty eyes and a real jeepers-creepers mouth. A little prayboy in a baseball shirt! Gosh!” He put his head close to Ellen’s and looked slyly at the boy through the gauze of her hair.
“Do all the praying you want, David, but don’t expect it to do you any help. Your God isn’t here, any more than he was with Jesus when Jesus hung dying on the cross with flies in his eyes. Tak!”
Ellen saw it coming up the stairs. She screamed and tried to pull back, but Entragian held her where she was. The coyote oiled through the doorway. It didn’t even look at the screaming woman with her arm pinched in the cop’s fist but crossed calmly to the center of the room. Then it stopped, turned its head over one shoulder, and fixed its yellow stuffed-animal stare on Entragian.
“Ah lah,” he said, and let go of Ellen’s arm long enough to spank his right hand across the back of his left hand in a quick gesture that reminded David of a flat stone skipping across the surface of a pond. “Him en tow.”
The coyote sat down.
“This guy is fast,” Entragian said. He was apparently speaking to all of them, but it was David he was looking at. “I mean the guy is fast. Faster than most dogs. You stick a hand or foot out of your cell, he’ll have it off before you know it’s gone. I guarantee that.”
“You leave my mother alone,” David said.
“Son,” Entragian said regretfully, “I’ll put a stick up your mother’s twat and spin her until she catches fire, if I so decide, and you’ll not stop me. And I’ll be back for you.
He went out the door, pulling David’s mother with him.
There was silence in the room, broken only by Ralph Carver’s choked sobs and the coyote, which sat panting and regarding David with its unpleasantly intelligent eyes.
Little drops of spittle fell from the end of its tongue like drops from a leaky pipe.
“Take heart, son,” the man with the shoulder-length gray hair said. He sounded like a guy more used to taking comfort than giving it. “You saw him-he’s got internal bleeding, he’s losing his teeth, one eye’s ruptured right out of his head. He can’t last much longer.”
“It won’t take him long to kill my mom, if he decides to,” David said. “He already killed my little sister.
He pushed her down the stairs and broke … broke her n-n-neck.” His eyes abruptly blurred with tears and he willed them back. This was no time to get bawling.
“Yes, but The gray-haired man trailed off.
David found himself remembering an exchange with the cop when they had been on their way to this town- when they had still thought the cop was sane and normal and only helping them out. He had asked the cop how he knew their name, and the cop had said he’d read it on the plaque over the table. It was a good answer, there was a plaque with their name on it over the table … but Entragian never would have been able to see it from where he was standing at the foot of their RV’s stairs. I’ve got eagle eyes, David, he’d said, and those are eyes that see the truth from afar.
Ralph Carver came slowly forward to the front of his cell again, almost shuffling. His eyes were bloodshot, the lids puffy, his face ravaged. For a moment David felt almost blinded with rage, shaken by a desire to scream:
This is all your fault! Your fault that Pie’s dead! Your fault that he’s taken Mom off to kill her or rape her! You and your gambling! You and your stupid vacation ideas! He should have taken you, Dad, he should have taken you!
Stop it, David. His thought, Gene Martin’s voice. That’s just the way it wants you to think.
It? The cop, Entragian, was that who the voice meant by it? And what way did he … or it … want him to think? For that matter, why would it care what way he thought at all?
“Look at that thing,” Ralph said, staring at the coyote. “How could he call it in here like that? And why does it stay?”
The coyote turned toward Ralph’s voice, then glanced at Mary, then looked back at David. It panted.
More saliva fell to the hardwood floor, where a little puddle was forming.
“He’s got them trained, somehow,” the gray-haired man said. “Like the birds. He’s got some trained buzzards out there. I killed one of the scraggy bastards. I stomped it-”
“No,” Mary said.
“No,” Billingsley echoed. “I’m sure that coyotes can be 7 trained, but this is not training.”
“Of course it is,” the gray-haired man snapped. “That cop?” David said. “Mr. Billingsley says he’s taller than he used to be. Three inches, at least.”
“That’s insane.” The gray-haired man was wearing a motorcycle jacket. Now he unzipped one of the pockets, took out a battered roll of Life Savers, and put one in his mouth.
“Sir, what’s your name?” Ralph asked the gray- haired man.
“Marinville. Johnny Marinville. I’m a-”
“What you are is blind if you can’t see that something very terrible and very out of the ordinary is going on here.”
“I didn’t say it wasn’t terrible, and I certainly didn’t say it was ordinary,” the gray-haired man replied.
He went on, but then the voice came again, the outside voice, and David lost track of their conversation.
The soap. David, the soap.
He looked at it-a green bar of Irish Spring sitting beside the spigot-and thought of Entragian saying I’ll be back for you.
The soap.
Suddenly he understood … or thought he did. Hoped he did.
I better be right. I better be right, or- He was wearing a Cleveland Indians tee-shirt. He pulled it off, dropped it by the cell door. He looked up and saw the coyote staring at him.
Its ragged ears were all the way up again, and David thought he could hear it growling, low and far back in its throat.
“Son?” his father asked. “What do you think you’re doing?”
Without answering, he sat down on the end of the bunk, took off his sneakers, and tossed them over to where his shirt lay. Now there was no question that the coyote was growling. As if it knew what he was planning to do. As if it meant to stop him if he actually tried it.
Don’t be a dope, of course it means to stop you if you try it, why else did the cop leave it there? You just have to trust. Trust and have faith.
“Have faith that God will protect me,” he murmured. He stood up, unbuckled his belt, then paused with his fingers on the snap of his jeans. “Ma’am?” he said.
“Ma’am?” She looked at him, and David felt himself blush. “I wonder if you’d mind turning around,” he said, “I have to take off my pants, and I guess I better take off my underwear, too.,’