You ‘re more than a sweetheart, Terry said inside his head. You’re really a saint, aren’t you?St. John the Lubricator. And then her cynical laughter.
Shut up, bitch, he thought… but as always, Terry was reluctant to go.
Be coot, Steven, he told himself. It’s the only way you’ll get out of this. If you panic, I think there’s a good chance both of you are going to die in this goddamn rented truck.
He put the transmission in reverse, and, steering by the outside mirror (he didn’t dare open his door and lean out; it would be too easy for a dive-bombing buzzard to break his neck), began to move backward.
The wind had picked up again, but he could still hear the crunching from under the truck as they rolled over the scorpions. It reminded him of how cereal sounded when you were chewing it.
Don’t drive off the side, for Christ’s sake don’t do that.
“They’re not following,” Cynthia said. The relief in her voice was unmistakable.
He took a look, saw that she was right, and stopped. He had backed up about fifty feet, far enough so that the lead trailer across the road was just a vague shape in the blowing sand again. He could see brown blotches against the whitish-gray sand in the road.
Squashed scorpions. From here they looked like pats of cow dung. And the others were retreating. In another moment he would find it hard to believe they had been there at all.
Oh, they were, he thought. If you start doubting that, old buddy, all you have to do is take a look at the dead bird currently blocking the air-vents at the bottom of the windshield.
“What do we do now?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” He looked out his window and saw the Desert Rose Cafe. Half of its pink awning had come down in the wind. He looked out the other window, past Cynthia, and saw a vacant lot with three boards nailed across the entrance. KEEP OUT OF HERE had been painted across the center board in sloppy white capitals, presumably by someone who didn’t believe in Western hospitality.
“Something wants to keep us in town,” she said. “You know that, don’t you?”
He backed the Ryder truck into the parking lot of the Desert Rose, trying to think of a plan. What came instead was a series of disjointed images and words. The doll lying face-down at the bottom of the RV’s steps. The Tractors, saying her name was Emergency and her telephone number was 911. Johnny Cash, saying he built it one piece at a time. Bodies on hooks, a tiger fish swimming between the fingers of the hand at the bottom of the aquarium, the baby’s bib, the snake on the kitchen counter under the microwave.
He realized he was on the edge of panic, maybe on the edge of doing something really stupid, and
groped for anything that would pull him back from the edge, get him thinking straight again. What came to his mind, unbidden, was something he never would have expected. It was an image-clearer than any of the preceding ones-of the piece of stone sculpture they had seen on the computer table in the mining corporation’s Quonset. The coyote with the strange, twisted head and the starting eyeballs, the coyote whose tongue had been a snake.
There ought to be a picture of that thing next to ugly in the dictionary, Cynthia had said, and she was right about that, oh yes, no question, but Steve was suddenly over-whelmed by the idea that anything that ugly also had to be powerful.
Are you kidding? he thought distractedly. The radio turned on and off when you touched it, the lights flickered, the aquarium fucking exploded. Of course it’s powerful.
“What was that little piece of statuary we found back there?” he asked. “What was up with that?”
“I don’t know. I only know that when I touched it. .
“What? When you touched it, what?”
“It seemed like I remembered every rotten thing that ever happened to me in my life,” she said. “Sylvia Marcucci spitting on me in the eighth grade, out in the play-ground-she said I stole her boyfriend, and I didn’t even know who the hell she was talking about. The time my dad got drunk at my Aunt Wanda’s second wedding and felt my ass while we were dancing and pretended it was a mistake. Like his hardon was a mistake, too.” Her hand crept to the side of her head. “Gettin yelled at. Gettin dumped on. Richie Judkins, almost ripping my fuckin ear off. I thought of all those things.”
“Yeah, but what did you really think of?”
She looked for a moment as if she were going to tell him not to be a wise-ass, then didn’t.
“Sex,” she said, and let out a shaky sigh. “Not just fucking, either. All of it. The dirtier the better.”
Yes, he thought, the dirtier the better. Things you might like to try but would never talk about.
Experimental stuff.
“What are you thinking about?” Her voice was oddly sharp, at the same time oddly pungent, like a smell.
Steve looked over at her and suddenly wondered if her pussy was tight. An insane thought to be having at a time like this, but it was what came into his head.
“Steve?” Sharper than ever. “What are you thinking?”
“Nothing,” he said. His voice was thick, the voice of a man struggling out of a deep sleep. “Nothing, never mind.”
“Does it start with C and end with E?”
Actually, my dear, “cunt” ends with a T, but you’re in the ballpark.
What was wrong with him? What in God’s name? It was as if that funny piece of rock had turned on another radio, this one in his head, and it was broadcasting a voice that was almost his own.
“What are you talking about?” he asked her.
“Coyote, coyote,” she said, lilting the words like a child. No, she wasn’t accusing him of anything, although he supposed that briefly thinking so had been a natural enough mistake; she was just falling all over herself with excitement. “The thing we saw back in the lab! If we had it, we could get out of here! I know we could, Steve! And don’t waste my time-our time-by telling me I’m crazy!”
Considering the stuff they had seen and the stuff that had happened to them in the last ninety minutes or so, he had no intention of doing that. If she was crazy, they both were.
But- “You told me not to touch it.” He was still struggling to talk; it was as if there were mud packed
into his thinking equipment. “You said it felt Felt what? What had she said?
Nice. That was it. “Touch it, Steve. It feels nice.”
No. Wrong.
“You said it felt nasty.”
She smiled at him. In the green glow of the dashlights, the smile looked cruel. “You want to feel something nasty? Feel this.”
She took his hand, put it between her legs, and twitched her hips upward twice. Steve closed his hand on her down there-hard enough to hurt, maybe-but her smile stayed on.
Widened, even.
What are we doing? And why in God’s name are we doing it now?
He heard the voice, but it was almost lost-like a voice screaming fire in a ballroom full of yelling people and jagged music. The cleft between her legs was closer, more urgent. He could feel it right through her jeans, and it was burning. Burning.
She said her name was Emergency and asked to see my gun, Steve thought. You’re going to see it, all right, honey, thirty-eight pistol on a forty-five frame, shoots tombstone bullets with a ball and chain.
He made a tremendous effort to catch hold of himself, grabbing for anything that would shut the pile down before the containment rods melted. What he got hold of was an image-the curious, wary expression on her face as she looked at him through the truck’s open passenger door, not getting in right away, wide blue eyes checking him out first, trying to decide if he was the kind of guy who might bite or maybe try to yank something off her. An ear, for instance. Are you a nice person? she’d asked him, and he had said Yeah, I guess so, and then, nice person that he was, he had brought her to this town of the
dead, and his hand was in her crotch, and he was thinking he’d like to fuck her and hurt her at the same time, kind of an experiment, you could say, one having to do with pleasure and pain, the sweet and the salty. Because that was the way it was done in the place of the wolf, that was how it was done in the house of the scorpion, it was what passed for love in Desperation.