If there was, why would he come see about me, anyhow. Why would he come see about me after I left the others back in that truck.
The wolf suddenly barked at him. It was an absurd sound, high-pitched, the kind of bark Johnny would have expected from a poodle or a cocker spaniel. There was nothing absurd about its teeth, though. Thick curds of spit flew out from between them with each high-pitched bark.
“Get out!” Johnny yelled at it in his shrill, wavering voice. “Get out right now!”
Instead of getting out, the wolf screwed its hindquarters down toward the floor. For a moment Johnny thought it was going to take a crap, that it was every damn bit as scared as he was, and it was going to take a crap on the laboratory floor. Then, a split second before it happened, be realized the wolf was preparing not to crap but to leap. At him.
“No, God no, please!” he screamed, and turned to run-back toward the ATV and the bodies hanging stiffly on their hooks.
In his head he did this; his body moved in the opposite direction, forward, as if directed by hands he could not see. There was no sense of being possessed, but a clear and unmistakable feeling of being no longer alone. His terror fell away. His first powerful instinct-to turn and run-also fell away. He took a step forward instead, pushing off from the table with his free hand. He cocked the hammer back to beyond his right shoulder and hurled it just as the wolf launched itself at him.
He expected the hammer to spin and was sure it would sail over the animal’s head-he had pitched at Lincoln Park High School about a thousand years ago and still knew the feeling of one that was going to be wild-high—but it didn’t. It was no Excalibur, just a plain old Crafts—man hammer with a perforated rubber sleeve on it to _ improve the grip, but it didn’t turn over and it didn’t go high.
What it did was strike the wolf dead center between the eyes.
There was a sound like a brick dropped on an oak plank. The green glare whiffed out of the wolf s eyes they turned into old marbles even as the’ blood began to pour out of the animal’s center-split skull. Then it hit him in the chest, driving him back against the table again, set ting off a brilliant burst of pain in the small of his back For a moment Johnny could smell the wolf-a dry smell almost cinnamony, like the spices the Egyptians had used to preserve the dead. For that moment the animal’s bloody face was turned up ‘to his, the teeth which should by all rights have torn out his throat leering impotently.
Johnny could see its tongue, and an old crescent-shaped scar on its muzzle. Then it dropped on his feet, like something loose and heavy wrapped in a ratty old steamer blanket Gasping, Johnny staggered away from it. He bent to pick up the hammer, then whirled around so clumsily he almost fell, sure that the wolf would be on its feet and coming for him again; there was no way he could have gotten it with the hammer like that, absolutely no way, that baby had been going high, your muscles remembered what it felt like when you’d uncorked one that was going all the way to the backstop, they remembered it very well But the wolf lay where it had fallen.
Is it time to reconsider David Carver’s God. Terry asked quietly. Stereo Terry now; she had a place in his head, and she also had a place on the wall under you MUST WEAR A HARDHAT.
“No,” he said. “It was a lucky shot, that’s all. Like the one-in-a-thousand at the carny when you actually do win your girlfriend the big stuffed panda-bear.”
Thought you said it was going high.
“Well, I was wrong, wasn’t I. Just like you used to tell me six or a dozen times every fucking day, you great bitch.” He was shocked by the hoarse, almost teary quality of his voice. “Wasn’t that pretty much your refrain 7 throughout the course of our charming union. You’re wrong, Johnny, you’re wrong, Johnny, you’re totally fucking wrong, Johnny.”
You left them, Terry’s voice said, and what stopped him was not the contempt he heard in that voice (which was, after all, only his own voice, his own mind up to its old bicameral tricks) but the despair. You left them to die. Worse, you continue to deny God even after you called on him… and he answered. What kind of man are you.
“A man who knows the difference between God and a free-throw,” he told the woman with the strawberry-blond hair and the bullet-hole in her lab coat. “A man who also knows enough to get while the getting’s good.”
He waited for Terry to respond. Terry didn’t. He con-sidered what had just happened a final time, scanning it with his nearly perfect recall, and found nothing but his own arm, which apparently hadn’t forgotten everything it had learned about throwing a fastball, and an ordinary Craftsman hammer. No blue light. No Cecil B. DeMille special effects.
No London Philharmonic swelling with a hundred violins’ worth of phony awe in the background. The terror and emptiness and despair he felt were transi-tory emotions; they would pass. What he was going to do right now was divorce the ATV from the ore-cart behind it, using the hammer to knock loose the cotter-pin cou-pling. What he was going to do next was get the ATV run-ning and get the hell out of this creepy little—“Not bad, ace,” said a voice from the doorway.
Johnny wheeled around. The boy was standing there. David. Looking at the wolf. Then he raised his unsmiling face to Johnny.
“A lucky shot,” Johnny said. “Think that was it.”
“Does your father know you’re out, David.”
“He knows.”
“If you came here to try and persuade me to stay, you’re shit out of luck,” Johnny said.
He bent over the coupling between the ore-cart and the ATV and took a swing at the cotter pin. He missed it completely and smashed his hand painfully against an angle of metal. He cried out and stuck his scraped knuckles into his mouth. Yet he had hit the leaping wolf dead between the eyes with the hammer, he—Johnny blocked the rest. He pulled his hand out of his mouth, tightened his grip on the hammer’s rubber sleeve, and bent over the coupling again. This time he hit it pretty well-not dead center, but close enough to pop the cotter pin free and send it rolling across the floor. It stopped beneath the dangling feet of the woman who looked like Terry.
And I’m not going to read anything into that, either.
“If you came to talk theology, you’re similarly out of luck,” Johnny said. “If, however, you’d like to accom pany me west to Austin-”
He broke off. The boy now had something in his hand was holding it out to him. Between them, the dead wolf lay on the lab floor.
“What’s that.” Johnny asked, but he knew. His eyes weren’t that bad yet. Suddenly his mouth felt very dry. Why are you chasing me. he thought suddenly-to what he did not precisely know, only that it wasn’t the kid. Why can’t you lose my scent. Just leave me alone.
“Your wallet,” David said. His eyes on him, so steady “It fell out of your pocket, in the truck. I brought it to you It’s got all your ID in it, in case you forget who you are “Very funny.”
“I wasn’t joking.”
“So what do you want.” Johnny asked harshly. A reward. Okay. Write down your address, I’ll send you either twenty bucks or an autographed book. Want a base ‘ball signed by Albert Belle. I can do that. Whatever you want. Whatever strikes your fancy.”
David looked down at the wolf for a moment. “Pretty good shot for a man who can’t even hit a coupling dead on from four inches away.”
“Shut up, wiseguy,” Johnny said. “Bring me the wallet if you’re coming. Toss it over if you’re not. Or just keep the goddam thing.”
“There’s a picture in it. You and two other guys stand ing in front of a place called The Viet Cong Lookout. A bar, I think.”
“Yeah, a bar,” Johnny agreed. He flexed his hand uneasily on the shaft of the hammer, barely feeling the sting run across his scraped knuckles. “The tall guy in that picture’s David Halberstam. Very famous writer. Histo nan. Baseball fan.”