That might be okay for the kids, the bootcamp recruits, but those days were behind him now. And it was sort of a relief that they were.
Not real, none of this, nah, no way. In reality he was just out for a ride in the old convertible, out for a ride with his son, the child of his middle years. They were going to Milly’s on the Square. They’d park around the side of the ice-cream stand, eat their cones, and maybe he’d tell the kid a few war stories about his own boyhood, not enough to bore him, kids had a low tolerance for tales that started “When I was a boy,” he knew that, he guessed every dad who didn’t have his head too far up his own ass did, so maybe just one or two about how he’d tried out for base-ball more or less as a lark, and goddamned if the coach hadn’t—“Johnny. Are you all right.”
He realized he had backed all the way to the edge of the street and was now just sitting here with the clutch in and the engine idling.
“Huh. Yeah. Fine.”
“What were you thinking about.”
“Kids. You’re the first one I’ve been around in… Christ, since my youngest went off to Duke. You’re okay, David. A little God-obsessed, but otherwise quite severely cool.”
David smiled. “Thanks.”
Johnny backed out a little farther, then swung around and shifted into first. As the ATV’s high-set headlights swept Main Street, he saw two things: the leprechaun weathervane which had topped Bud’s Suds was now lying in the street, and Steve’s truck was gone.
“If they did what you wanted, I guess they’re on their way up there,” Johnny said.
“When they find Mary they’ll wait for us.”
“Will they find her, do you think.”
“I’m almost positive they will. And I think she’s okay. It was close, though.” He glanced over at Johnny and this time he smiled more fully. Johnny thought it was a beau—tiful smile. “You’re going to come out of this all right, too, I think. Maybe you’ll write about it.”
“I usually write about the stuff that happens to me. Dress it up a little and it does fine.
But this… I don’t know.”
They were passing The American West. Johnny thought of Audrey Wyler, lying in there under the ruins of the bal-cony. What was left of her.
“David, how much of Audrey’s story was true. Do you know.”
“Most of it.” David was looking at the theater, too, craning his neck to keep it in view a moment or two longer as they passed. Then he turned back to Johnny. His face was thoughtful… and, Johnny thought, sad. “She wasn’t a bad person, you know. What happened to her was like being caught in a landslide or a flood, something like that.”
“An act of God.”
“Right.”
“Our God. Yours and mine.”
“Right.”
“And God is cruel.”
“Right again.”
“You’ve got some damned tough ideas for a kid, you know it.”
Passing the Municipal Building now. The place where the boy’s sister had been killed and his mother snatched away into some final darkness. David looked at it with eyes Johnny couldn’t read, then raised his hands and scrubbed at his face with them. The gesture made him look his age again, and Johnny was shocked to see how young that was.
“More of them than I ever wanted to have,” David said. “You know what God finally told Job when he got tired of listening to all Job’s complaints.”
“Pretty much told him to fuck off, didn’t he.”
“Yeah. You want to hear something really bad.”
“Can’t wait.”
The ATV was riding over ridges of sand in a series of toothrattling jounces. Johnny could see the edge of town up ahead. He wanted to go faster, but anything beyond second gear seemed imprudent, given the short reach of the headlights. It might be true that they were in God’s hands, but God reputedly helped those who helped them-selves. Maybe that was why he had kept the hammer.
“I have a friend. Brian Ross, his name is. He’s my best friend. Once we made a Parthenon entirely out of bottlecaps.”
“Did you.”
“Uh-huh. Brian’s dad helped us a little, but mostly we did it ourselves. We’d stay up Saturday nights and watch old horror movies. The black-and-white ones. Boris Karloff was our favorite monster. Frankenstein was good, but we liked The Mummy even better.
We were always going to each other, ‘Oh shit, the mummy’s after us, we better walk a little faster.’ Goofy stuff like that, but fun. You know.”
Johnny smiled and nodded.
“Anyway, Brian was in an accident. A drunk hit him while he was riding to school. I mean, quarter of eight in the morning, and this guy is drunk on his ass. Do you believe that.”
“Sure,” Johnny said, “you bet.”
David gave him a considering look, nodded, then went on. “Brian hit his head. Bad.
Fractured his skull and hurt his brain. He was in a coma, and he wasn’t supposed to live.
But-”
“Let me guess the rest. You prayed to God that your friend would be all right, and two days later, bingo, that boy be walkin n talkin, praise Jesus my lord n savior.”
“You don’t believe it.”
Johnny laughed. “Actually, I do. After what’s happened to me since this afternoon, a little thing like that seems perfectly sane and reasonable.”
“I went to a place that was special to me and Brian to pray. A platform we built in a tree.
We called it the Viet Cong Lookout.”
Johnny looked at him gravely. “You’re not kidding about that.”
David shook his head. “I can’t remember which one of us named it that now, not for sure, but that’s what we called it. We thought it was from some old movie, but if it was, I can’t remember which one. We had a sign and everything. That was our place, that’s where I went, and what I said was-” He closed his eyes, thinking. “What I said was, ‘God, make him better. If you do, I’ll do some—thing for you. I promise.’ “David opened his eyes again. “He got better almost right away.”
“And now it’s payback time. That’s the bad part, right.”
“No! I don’j mind paying back. Last year I bet my dad five bucks that the Pacers would win the NBA champion-ship, and when they didn’t, he tried to let me off because he said I was just a kid, I bet my heart instead of my head. Maybe he was right-”
“Probably he was right.”
“-but I paid up just the same. Because it’s bush not to pay what you owe, and it’s bush not to do what you promise.” David leaned toward him and lowered his voice… as if he was afraid God might overhear. “The really bad part is that God knew I’d be coming out here, and he already knew what he wanted me to do. And he knew what I’d have to know to do it. My folks aren’t reli-gious-Christmas and Easter, mostly-and until Brian’s accident, I wasn’t, either. All the Bible I knew was John three-sixteen, on account of it’s always on the signs the zellies hold up at the ballpark. For God so loved the world.”
They were passing the bodega with its fallen sign now. The LP tanks had torn off the side of the building and lay in the desert sixty or seventy yards away. China Pit loomed ahead.
In the starlight it looked like a whited sepulchre.
“What are zellies.”
“Zealots. That’s my friend Reverend Martin’s word. I think he’s… I think something may have happened to him.” David fell silent for a moment, staring at the road. Its edges had been blurred by the sandstorm, and out here there were drifts as well as ridges spilled across their path. The ATV took them easily. “Anyway, I didn’t know anything about Jacob and Esau or Joseph’s coat of many colors or Potiphar’s wife until Brian’s accident.
Mostly what I was interested in back in those days”-he spoke, Johnny thought, like a nonagenarian war veteran describing ancient battles and forgotten campaigns-”was whether or not Albert Belle would ever win the American League MVP.”
He turned toward Johnny, his face grave.
“The bad thing isn’t that God would put me in a posi-tion where I’d owe him a favor, but that he’d hurt Brian to do it.”