Are you a nice person? Not a crazy serial killer or any-thing? Are you nice, are you nice, are you a nice person?
He pulled his hand away from her, shuddering. He turned to the window and looked out into the blowing blackness where sand danced like snow. He could feel sweat on his chest and arms and in his armpits, and although it was a little better now, he still felt like a sick man between fits of delirium. Now that he had thought of the stone wolf, he couldn’t unthink it, it seemed; he kept seeing its crazy corkscrewed head and bulging eyes. It hung in his head like an unsatisfied habit.
“What’s wrong?” she moaned from beside him. “Oh, Jesus, Steve, I didn’t mean to do that, what’s wrong with us?”
“I don’t know,” he said hoarsely, “but I’ll tell you something I do know-we just got us a little taste of what happened in this town, and I don’t like it much. I can’t get that fucking stone thing out of my mind.”
He finally found enough courage to look at her. She was all the way over against the passenger door, like a scared teenager on a first date that had gone too far, and although she looked calm enough, her cheeks were fiery red and she was wiping away tears with the side of her hand.
“Me, either,” she said. “I remember once I got a little piece of glass in my eye. That’s what this feels like.
I keep thinking I’d like to take that stone and rub it against my.. . you know. Except it’s not much like thinking. It’s not like thinking at all.”
“I know,” he said, wishing savagely that she hadn’t said that. Because now the idea was in his mind, too.
He saw himself rubbing that ugly damned thing-ugly but powerful against his erect penis. And from there he saw the two of them fucking on the floor beneath that row of hooks, beneath those dangling corpses, with that crumbling gray piece of stone held between them, in their teeth.
Steve swept the images away … although how long he would be able to keep them away he didn’t know. He looked at her again and managed a smile. “Don’t call me cookie,” he said. “Don’t call me
cookie and I won’t call you cake.”
She let out a long, trembling, half-vocalized breath that fell just a little short of laughter.
“Yeah. Somethin like that, anyway. I think it might be getting a little better.”
He nodded cautiously. Yes. He still had a world-class hardon, and he could badly use a reprieve from that, but now his thoughts seemed a little more his own. If he could keep them diverted from that piece of stone a little while longer, he thought he’d be okay. But for a few seconds there it had been bad, maybe the worst thing that had ever happened to him. In those seconds he had known how guys like Ted Bundy must feel. He could have killed her. Maybe would have killed her, if he hadn’t broken his physical contact with her when he had. Or, he supposed, she might have killed him. It was as if sex and murder had somehow changed places in this horrible little town. Except even sex wasn’t what it was about, not really. He remembered how, when she had touched the wolf, the lights had flickered and the radio had come back on.
“Not sex,” he said. “Not murder, either. Power.”
“Huh?”
“Nothing. I’m going to drive us right back through the middle of town. Out toward the mine.”
“That big wall off to the south?”
He nodded. “It’s an open-pit. There’ll have to be at least one equipment road out there that cuts back to 50. We’re going to find it and take it. I’m actually glad this one is blocked off. I don’t want to go anywhere near that Quonset, or that-”
She reached out and grabbed his arm. Steve followed her gaze and saw something come slinking into the arc of the truck’s headlights. The dust was now so thick that at first the animal looked like a ghost, some Indian-conjured spirit from a hundred years ago. It was a timberwolf, easily the length and height of a German Shepherd, but leaner. Its eyes were sockets of crimson in the headlights. Following it like attendants in some malign fairy-tale were two files of desert scorpions with their stingers furled over their
backs.
Flanking the scorpions were coyotes, two on each side. They appeared to be grinning nervously.
The wind gusted. The truck rocked on its springs. To their left, the fallen piece of awning flapped like a torn sail.
“The wolf’s carrying something,” she said hoarsely.
“You’re nuts,” he said, but as it drew closer, he saw that she wasn’t nuts. The wolf stopped about twenty feet from the truck, as bald and real as something in a high-resolution crime-scene photograph.
Then it lowered its head and dropped the thing it had been holding in its mouth. It looked at it attentively for a moment, then backed off three steps. It sat down and began to pant.
It was the statue-fragment, lying there on its side at the entrance to the cafe parking lot, lying there in the blowing dust, mouth snarling, head twisted, eyes starting from their sockets. Fury, rage, sex, power-it seemed to broad-cast these things at the truck in a tight cone, like some sort of magnetic field.
The image of fucking Cynthia recurred, of being buried in her like a sword jammed hilt deep in hot, packed mud, the two of them face-to-face, lips drawn back in identical snarls as they gripped the snarling stone coyote between them like a thong.
“Should I get it?” she asked, and now she was the one who sounded as if she were sleeping.
“Are you kidding?” he asked. His voice, hisTexas accent, but not his words, not now.
These words were coming from the radio in his head, the one the piece of stone statue had turned on.
Its eyes, glaring at him from where it lay in the dust.
“What, then?”
He looked at her and grinned. The expression felt ghastly on his face. It also felt wonderful. “We’ll get it together, of course. Okay by you?”
His mind was the storm now, filled with roaring wind from side to side and top to bottom, driving before it the images of what he would do to her, what she would do to him, and what they would do to anyone who got in their way.
She grinned back, her thin cheeks stretching upward until it was like looking at a skull grin.
Greenish-white light from the dashboard painted her brow and lips, filled in her eyesockets. She stuck her tongue out through that grin and flicked it at him, like the snake-tongue of the statue. He stuck his own tongue out and wriggled it back at her. Then he groped for the doorhandle. He would race her to the fragment, and they would make love among the scorpions with it held in their mouths between them, and whatever happened after that wouldn’t matter.
Because in a very real sense, they would be gone.
Johnny came back out onto the sidewalk and handed the bottle of Jim Beam to Billingsley, who looked at it with the unbelieving eyes of a man who has just been told he’s won the Powerball lottery. “There you go, Tom,” he said. “Have yourself a tonk-just the one, mind you-and then pass it on. None for me, I’ve taken the pledge.” He looked across the street, expecting to see more coyotes, but there were still just the five of them.
I’ll take the fifth, Johnny thought, watching as the veterinarian spun the cap off the bottle of whiskey.
You’d go along with that, wouldn’t you, Tom? Of course you would.
“What is wrong with you?” Mary asked him. “Just what in the hell is wrong with you?”
“Nothing,” Johnny said. “Well, a broken nose, but I guess that isn’t what you meant, is it?”
Billingsley tilted the bottle back with a short, sharp flick of the wrist that looked as practiced as a nurse’s injection technique, and then coughed. Tears welled in his eyes. He put the mouth of the bottle to his lips
again, and Johnny snatched it away. “Nope, I don’t think so, oldtimer.”
He offered the bottle to Ralph, who took it, looked at it, then bit off a quick swallow.
Ralph then offered it to Mary.
“Go on,” Ralph said. His voice was quiet, almost humble. “Better if you do.”
She looked at Johnny with hateful, perplexed eyes, then took a nip from the bottle. She coughed, holding it away from her and looking at it as if it were toxic. Ralph took it back, plucked the cap from Billingsley’s left hand, and put it back on. During this, Johnny opened the bottle of aspirin, shook out half a dozen, bounced them in his hand for a moment, then tossed them into his mouth.