David did. As he finished, something apparently occurred to Marinville. He started to grab for the phone, then restrained himself. “Tell him to park the truck away from the theater,” he said. The great American novelist also spoke in low tones, and he had one hand up to his mouth, as if he thought there might be a lipreader or two among the coyotes. “If he leaves it in front and Entragian comes back..
David nodded and passed this on, as well. Listened as Steve said something else, nodding, the smile resurfacing. Mary’s eyes drifted, to the coyotes. As she looked at them, she realized an exceedingly perverse thing: if they managed to hide from Entragian long enough to regroup and get out of town, part of her would be sorry. Because once this was over, she would have to confront the fact of Peter’s death; she would have to grieve for him and for the destruction of the life they had made together. And that was maybe not the worst of it. She would also have to think about all this, try and make some sense of it, and she wasn’t sure she could do it. She wasn’t sure any of them would be able to do it. Except maybe for David. “Come as fast as you can,” he said. There was a faint bleep as he pushed the END button. He collapsed the antenna and handed the phone back to Marinville, who immediately pulled the antenna out again, studied the LED readout, shook his head, and closed the phone up.
“How’d you do it, David? Magic?”
The kid looked at him as if Marinville were crazy. “God,” he said.
“God, you dope,” Mary said, smiling in a way that did not feel familiar to her at all. This wasn’t the time to be pulling Marinville’s chain, but she simply couldn’t resist.
“Maybe you should have just told Mr. Marinville’s friend to come and pick us up,” Ralph said dubiously. “That probably would have been the simplest, David.”
“It’s not simple,” David replied. “Steve’ll tell you that when they get here.”
“They?” Marmnville asked.
David ignored him. He was looking at his father. “Also, there’s Mom,” he said. “We’re not leaving without her.”
“What are we going to do about them?” Mary asked, and pointed across the Street at the coyotes. She could have sworn that they not only saw the gesture but under-stood it.
Marinville stepped off the sidewalk and into the street, his long gray hair blowing out and making him look like an Old Testament prophet. The coyotes got to their feet, and the wind brought her the sound of their growls. Marinville had to be hearing them, too, but he went on another step or two nevertheless. He half-closed his eyes for a moment, not as if the sand was bothering them but as if he was trying to remember something. Then he clapped his hands together once, sharply. “Tak!” One of the coy-otes lifted its snout and howled. The sound made Mary shudder. “Tak, ah lah! Tak!”
The coyotes appeared to move a little closer together, but that was all.
Marinville clapped his hands again. “Tak!… Ah lah… Tak!… oh, shit on this, I was never any good at foreign languages, anyhow.” He stood looking disgusted and uncertain. That they might attack him-him and his unloaded Mossberg .22-seemed the furthest thing from his mind.
David stepped down from the sidewalk. His father grabbed at his collar. “It’s okay, Dad,” David said.
Ralph let go, but followed as David went to Marinville. And then the boy said something Mary thought she might remember even if her mind succeeded in blocking the rest of this out-it was the sort of thing that came back to you in dreams, if nowhere else.
“Don’t speak to them in the language of the dead, Mr. Marinville.”
David took another step forward. Now he was alone in the middle of the street, with Ralph and Marmnville standing behind him. Mary and Billingsley were behind them, up on the sidewalk. The wind had reached a single high shriek. Mary could feel the dust stinging her cheeks and forehead, but for the time being, that seemed far away, unimportant.
David put his hands together in front of his mouth, finger to finger, in that child’s gesture of prayer. Then he held them out again, palms up, in the direction of the coyotes. “May the Lord bless you and keep you, may the Lord make his face to shine upon you, and lift you up, and give you peace,” he said. “Now get out of here. Take a hike.”
It was as if a swarm of bees had settled on them. They whirled in a clumsy, jostling mass of snouts and ears and teeth and tails, nipping at one another’s flanks and at their own.
Then they raced off, yapping and yowling in what sounded like some painful argument.
She could hear them, even with the contending shriek of the wind, for a long time.
David turned back, surveyed their dumbfounded faces -expressions too large to miss, even in the gloom-and smiled a little. He shrugged, as if to say Well, what are you gonna do? Mary observed that his face was still tinted Irish Spring green. He looked like the victim of an inept Halloween makeup job.
“Come on,” David said. “Let’s go.”
They clustered in the street. “And a little child shall lead them,” Marinville said. “So come on, child-lead.”
The five of them began trudging north alongMain Street toward The American West.
“I think that’s it.” Cynthia pointed out her window. “See it?”
Steve, hunched over the wheel and squinting through the bloodsmeared windshield (although it was the sand sticking in the blood that was the real problem), nodded. Yes, he could see the old-fashioned marquee, held by rusty chains to the side of a weathered brick building. There was only one letter left on the marquee, a crooked R.
He turned left, onto the tarmac of the Conoco station. A sign reading BEST CIG PRICES IN TOWN
had fallen over. Sand had piled against the concrete base of the single pump island like a snowdrift.
“Where you going? I thought the kid told you the movie theater!”
“He also told me not to park the truck near it. He’s right, too. That wouldn’t. . . hey, there’s a guy in there!”
Steve brought the truck to a hard stop. There was indeed a guy in the Conoco station’s office, rocked back in his chair with his feet on his desk. Except for some-thing in his posture-mostly the awkward way his head was lying over on his neck-he could have been sleeping.
“Dead,” Cynthia said, and put a hand on Steve’s shoulder as he opened his door.
“Don’t bother. I can tell from here.”
“We still need a place to hide the truck. If there’s room in the garage, I’ll open the door. You drive in.”
There was no need to ask if she could do it; he hadn’t forgotten the spiffy way she’d handled the truck out on Highway 50.
“Okay. But do it fast.”
“Believe me,” he said. He started to get out, then hesitated. “You are all right, aren’t you?”
She smiled. It clearly took some effort, but it was a working smile, all the same. “For the time being.
You?”
“Smokin.”
He got out, slammed the door behind him, and hurried across the tarmac to the gas station’s office door.
He was amazed at how much sand had accumulated already. It was as if the west wind were intent on burying the town. Judging from what he had seen of it so far, that wasn’t such a bad idea.
There was a tumbleweed caught in the recessed doorway, its skeletal branches rattling. Steve booted it and it flew away into the night. He turned, saw that Cynthia was now behind the wheel of the truck, and gave her a little salute. She held her fists up in front of her, her face serious and intent, then popped the thumbs. Mission Control, we are A-OK. Steve grinned, nodded, and went inside. God, she could be funny. He didn’t know if she knew it or not, but she could be.
The guy in the office chair needed a spot of burying. Inside the shadow thrown by the bill of his cap, his face was purple, the skin stretched and shiny. It had been stencilled with maybe two dozen black marks.
Not snakebites, and too small even to be scorpion stings- There was a skin magazine on the desk. Steve could read the title-Lesbo Sweethearts-upside down. Now something crawled over the edge of the desk and across the naked women on the cover. It was followed by two friends. The three of them reached the edge of the desk and stopped there in a neat line, like soldiers at parade rest.
Three more came out from under the desk and scurried across the dirty linoleum floor toward him. Steve took a step backward, set himself, then brought a workboot down, hard. He got two of the three. The other zigged to the right and raced off toward what was probably the bathroom. When Steve looked back at the desk, he saw there were now eight fellows lined up along the edge, like movie Indians on a ridge.