Johnny looked around at the others, and was dismally astounded to see they were in agreement; only he stood apart. And Steve had the keys to the truck in his pocket. Yet it was him the boy was mostly looking at. Him. As it was him, John Edward Marinville, that people had been mostly looking at ever since he had published his first novel at the impossibly precocious age of twenty-two. He thought he had gotten used to it, and maybe he had, but this time it was different. He had an idea that none of the others-the teachers, the readers, the critics, the editors, the drinking buddies, the women-had ever wanted what this boy seemed to want, which was not just for him to listen; listening, Johnny was afraid, was only where it would start.
The eyes were not just looking, though. The eyes were pleading.
Forget it, kid, he thought. When people like you drive, the bus always seems to crash.
if it wasn’t for David, 1 think your personal bus would have crashed already, Terry said from Der Bitchen Bunker inside his head. 1 think you’d be dead and hung up on a hook somewhere. Listen to him, Johnny. For Christ’s sake, listen!
In a much lower voice, Johnny said: “Entragian’s gone. You’re sure of that.”
“Yes,” David said. “The animals, too. The coyotes and wolves-hundreds of them, it must have taken, maybe thousands-moved the trailers off the road. Dumped them over the side and onto the hardpan. Now most of them have drawn away, into ml him, the watchman’s circle.” He drank from the bottle of Jolt. The hand holding it shook slightly. He looked at each of them in turn, but it was Johnny his eyes came back to. Always Johnny. “He wants what you want. For us to leave.”
“Then why did he bring us here in the first place.” “He didn’t.”
“What.”
“He thinks he did, but he didn’t.”
“I don’t have any idea what you’re-”
“God brought us,” David said. “To stop him.”
In the silence which followed this, Steve discov-ered he was listening for the wind outside. There was none. He thought he could hear a plane far away-sane people on their way to some sane destination, sleeping or eating or reading U.S. News & World Report—but that was all.
It was Johnny who broke the silence, of course, and although he sounded as confident as ever, there was a look in his eyes (a slidey look) that Steve didn’t like much. He thought he liked Johnny’s crazed look better the wide eyes and terrified Clyde Barrow grin he’d had on when he put the shotgun up to the cougar’s ear and blew its head of f. That there was a half-bright outlaw in Johnny was something Steve knew very well-he’d seen flickers of that guy from the start of the tour, and knew it was the outlaw Bill Harris had feared when he laid down the Five Commandments that day in Jack Appleton’s office—but Clyde Barrow seemed to have stepped out and left the other Marinville, the one with the satiric eyebrow and the windbag William F. Buckley rhetoric, in his place.
“You speak as if we all had the same God, David,” he said. “I don’t mean to patronize you, but I hardly think that’s the case.”
“But it is the case,” David replied calmly. “Compared to Tak, you and a cannibal king would have the same God. You’ve seen the can tahs, I know you have. And you’ve felt what they can do.”
Johnny’s mouth twitched-indicating, Steve thought, that he had taken a hit but didn’t want to admit it. “Per-haps that’s so,” he said, “but the person who brought me here was a long way from God. He was a big blond policeman with skin problems. He planted a bag of dope in my saddlebag and then beat the shit out of me.”
“Yes. I know. The dope came from Mary’s car. He put something like nails in the road to get us. It’s funny, when you think about it-funny-weird, not ha-ha. He went through Desperation like a whirlwind-shot people, stabbed them, beat them, pushed them out windows, ran them down with his car-but he still couldn’t just come up to us, any of us, and take out his gun and say ‘You’re coming with me.’ He had to have a… I don’t know the word.” He looked at Johnny.
“Pretext,” Steve’s erstwhile boss said.
“Yes, right, a pretext. It’s like how, in the old horror movies, a vampire can’t just come in on his own. You have to invite him in.”
“Why.” Cynthia asked.
“Maybe because Entragian-the real Entragian-was still inside his head. Like a shadow. Or a person that’s locked out of his house but can still look in the windows and pound on the doors. Now Tak’s in my mother—what’s left of her-and it would kill us if it could… but it could probably still make the best Key lime pie in the world, too. If it wanted to.”
David looked down for a moment, his lips trembling, then looked back up at them.
“Him needing a pretext to take us doesn’t really matter. Many times what he does or says doesn’t matter-it’s nonsense, or impulse. Although there are clues. Always clues. He gives himself away, shows his real self, like someone who says what he sees in inkblots.”
Steve asked, “If that doesn’t matter, what does.”
“That he took us and let other people go. He thinks he took us at random, like a little kid in a supermarket, just pulling any can that catches his eye off the shelf and drop… ping it into his mom’s cart, but that’s not what happened.”
“It’s like the Angel of Death in Egypt, isn’t it.” Cyn-thia said in a curiously flat voice.
“Only in reverse. We had a mark on us that told our Angel of Death-this guy Entragian-to stop and grab instead of just going on by.”
David nodded. “Yeah. He didn’t know it then, but he does now-mi him en tow, he’d say—our God is strong, our God is with us.”
“If this is an example of God being with us, I hope r I never attract his attention when he’s in a snit,” Johnny said. — “Now Tak wants us to go,” David said, “and he knows that we can go. Because of the free-will covenant. That s what Reverend Martin always called it. He… he…
“David.” Ralph asked. “What is it. What’s wrong.” David shrugged. “Nothing. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that God never makes us do what he wants us to do. He tells us, that’s all, then steps back to see how it turns out. Reverend Martin’s wife came in and listened for awhile while he was talking about the free-will covenant. She said her mother had a motto: ‘God says take what you want, and pay for it.’ Tak’s opened the door back to Highway 50… but that isn’t where we’re supposed to go. If we do go, if we leave Desperation without doing what God sent us here to do, we’ll pay the price.
He glanced at the circle of faces around him once again, and once again he finished by looking directly at Johnny Marmnville.
“I’ll stay no matter what, but to work, it really has to be all of us. We have to give our will over to God’s will, and we have to be ready to die. Because that’s what it might come to.”
“You’re insane, my boy,” Johnny said. “Ordinarily I like that in a person, but this is going a little too far, even for me. I haven’t survived this long in order to be shot or r pecked to death by buzzards in the desert. As for God, as far as I’m concerned, he died in the DMZ back in 1969.
Jimi Hendrix was playing ‘Purple Haze’ on Armed Ser-vices Radio at the time.”
“Listen to the rest, okay. Will you do that much.”
“Why should I.”
“Because there’s a story.” David drank more Jolt, gri-macing as he swallowed. “A good one. Will you listen.”
“Story-hour’s over. I told you that.”
David didn’t reply.
There was silence in the back of the truck. Steve was watching Johnny closely. If he showed any sign of moving toward the Ryder’s back door and trying to run it up, Steve meant to grab him. He didn’t want to-he had spent a lot of years in the savagely hierarchical world of backstage rock, and knew that doing such a thing would make him feel like Fletcher Christian to Johnny’s Captain Bligh-but he would if he had to.
So it was a relief when Johnny shrugged, smiled, hun-kered down next to the kid, and selected his own bottle of Jolt. “Okay, so story-hour’s extended. Just for tonight.” He ruffled David’s hair. The very self-consciousness of the gesture made it oddly charming.