“Yes, sure, what’s the deal.”
Ripton leans back against the poster taped up in the corner, the one showing a dirty miner pointing like Uncle Sam and saying GO AHEAD, BAN MINING, LET THE BASTARDS FREEZE IN THE DARK! “If you hop in your car and drive out here right now, I’ll show you,” Ripton says. “And—f you get here before Pascal Martinez and his boys, I’ll give you a chance at the most amazing pictures you’ll ever take in your life.”
“What are you talking about.” Josephson sounds excited now.
“The bones of forty or fifty dead Chinese, to start with, how’s that sound.”
“What-”
“We punched into the old China Shaft yesterday after-noon. Less than twenty feet in you’ll get the most amazing-”
“I’m on my way. Don’t you move. Don’t you goddam move.
The phone clicks in his ear and Ripton grins with red lips. “I won’t,” he says. “Don’t worry about that. Can de lach! Ah ten! Tak!”
Ten minutes later, Ripton-now bleeding from the navel as well as the rectum and penis—walks across the crumbled bottom of the pit to the China Slope. Here he spreads his arms like an evangelist and speaks to the ani-mals in the language of the unformed. All of them either fly away or withdraw into the mine. It will not do for Brad Josephson to see them.
No, that would not do at all.
Five minutes after that Josephson comes down the steep grade of the pit-road, sitting bolt-upright behind the wheel of an old Buick. The sticker on the front reads MINERS GO DEEPER AND STAY LONGER. Ripton watches him from the door of the field office. It wouldn’t do for Brad to get a good look at him, either, not until he gets a little closer.
No problem there. Brad parks with a scrunch of tires, gets out, grabs three different cameras, and trots toward the field office, pausing only to gape at the open hole twenty feet or so up the slope.
“Holy shit, it’s the China, all right,” he says. “Got to be. Come on, Gary! For Christ’s sake, Martinez ‘11 be here any time!”
“Nah, they start a little later on Saturday,” he says, grinning. “Cool your jets.”
“Yeah, but what about old Joe. He could be a prob-”
“Cool your jets, i said! Joe’s in Reno. Granddaughter popped a kid.”
“Good! Great! Have a cigar, huh.” Brad laughs a little wildly.
“Come in here,” Ripton says. “Got something to show you.
“Something you brought out.”
“That’s right,” Ripton says, and in a way it’s true, in a way he does want to show Brad something he brought out. Josephson is still frowning down at his swinging cameras, trying to sort out the straps, when Ripton grabs him and throws him to the back of the room. Josephson squawks indignantly. Later he will be scared, and still later he’ll be terrified, but right now he hasn’t noticed Joe Prudum ’s body and is only indignant.
“For the last time, cool your jets!” Ripton says as he steps outside and locks the door.
“Gosh! Relax!”
Laughing, he goes to the truck and gets in. Like many Westerners, Gary Ripton believes passionately in the right of Americans to bear arms; there’s a shotgun in the rack behind the seat and a nasty little hideout gun-a Ruger Speed-Six-in the glovebox. He loads the shotgun and lays it across his lap. The Ruger, which is already loaded, he simply puts on the seat beside him. His first impulse is to tuck it into his belt, but now he’s all but swimming in blood down there (Ripton, you idiot, he thinks, don’t you know men your age are supposed to get the old prostate tickled every year or so), and soaking Ripton ’s pistol in it might not be a good idea.
When Josephson ’s ceaseless hammering at the field—office door begins to annoy him, he turns on the radio, juices the volume, and sings along with Johnny Paycheck, who is telling whoever wants to listen that he was the only hell his mama ever raised.
Pretty soon Pascal Martinez shows up for some of that good old Saturday-morning time and a half He’s got Miguel Rivera, his amigo, with him. Ripton waves. Pascal waves back. He parks on the other side of the field office, and then he and Mig walk around to see what Ripton ’s doing here on Saturday morning, and at this ungodly hour. Ripton sticks the shotgun out the window, still smiling, and shoots both of them. it’s easy.
Neither tries to run. They die with puzzled looks on their faces. Ripton looks at them, thinking of his granddaddy telling about the passenger pigeons, birds so dumb you could club them on the ground. The men out here all have guns but few of them think, way down deep, that they will ever have to use one. They are all show and no go. Or all hat and no cattle, — f you like that better.
The rest of the crew arrives by ones and twos-no one worries much about the timeclock on Saturdays. Ripton shoots them as they come and drags their bodies around to the back of the field office, where, they soon begin to stack up beneath the clothes dryer’s exhaust-pipe like cordwood. When he runs out of shotgun shells (there’s plenty of ammo for the Ruger, but the pistol is useless as a primary weapon, not accurate at a distance greater than a dozen feet), he finds Martinez’s keys, opens the back of his Cherokee, and discovers a beautiful (and completely illegal) Jver Johnson auto under a blanket. Next to it are two dozen thirty-round clips in a Nike shoebox. The arriving miners hear the shots as they ascend the north side of the pit, but they think it’s target-shooting, which is how a good many Saturdays start in the China Pit. It’s a beautiful thing.
By seven forty-five, Ripton has killed everyone on Pascal Martinez’s A-crew. As a bonus, he gets the one—legged guy from Bud’s Suds who has come out to service the coffee-machine. Twenty-five bodies behind the field office.
The animals start moving in and out of the China Shaft again, streaming toward town with can tahs in their mouths. Soon they will quit for the day, waiting for the cover of night to start again.
In the meantime, the pit is his… and it is time to make the jump. He wants out of this unpleasantly decaying body, and if he doesn ‘t make the switch soon, he never will.
When he opens the door, Brad Josephson rushes him. He has heard the gunfire, he has heard the screams when Ripton ’s first shot hasn’t put his victim down cleanly, and he knows that rushing is the only option he has. He expects to be shot, but of course Gary can ‘t do that. Instead he grabs Josephson ’s arms, calling on the last of this body’s strength to do it, and shoves the black man against the wall so hard that the entire prefab building shakes. And it’s not just Ripton now, of course; it’s Tak’s strength. As if to confirm this, Josephson asks how in God’s name he got so tall.
“Wheaties!” it exclaims. “Talc!”
“What are you doing.” Josephson asks, trying to squirm away as Ripton ’s face bears down on his and Ripton ’s mouth comes open. “What are you d-”
“Kiss me, beautiful!” Ripton exclaims, and slams his mouth down on Josephson ’s. He makes a blood-seal through which he exhales. Josephson goes rigid in Rip—ton ’s arms and begins to tremble wildly. Ripton exhales and exhales, going out and out and out, feeling it happen, feeling the transfer. For one terrible moment the essence of Tak is naked, caught between Ripton, who is collaps-ing, and Josephson, who has begun to swell like a float on the morning of the Thanksgiving Day Parade. And then, instead of looking out of Ripton ’s eyes, it is looking out of Josephson ’s eyes.
It feels a wonderful, intoxicating sense of rebirth. It is filled not—only with the strength and purpose of Tak, but with the greasefired energy of a man who eats four eggs and half a pound of limp bacon for breakfast. It feels… feels.
“I feel GRRRREA T!” Brad Josephson exclaims in a boisterous Tony the Tiger voice. It can hear a tenebrous creaking that is Brad’s backbone growing, the taut silk—across-satin sound that is his muscles stretching, the thawing-ice sound of his skull expanding. He breaks wind repeatedly, the sound like the reports of a track—starter s gun.