And it’s all so easy, she thought. As easy as a penny slipping through a hole in your pocket.
“David.” Johnny asked. “Do you know how Tak got into Ripton in the first place.”
David shook his head.
Johnny nodded as if that was what he had expected and sat back, resting his head against the side of the truck. Mary realized that, as exasperating as Marinville could be, she sort of liked him. And not just because he had come back with David; she had sort of liked him ever since… well, since they were looking for guns, she guessed. She’d scared him, but he had bounced back. She guessed he was the kind of guy who had made a second career out of bouncing back from stuff. And when he wasn’t concentrating on being an asshole, he could be amusing.
The.30-.06 was lying beside him. Johnny felt around for it without raising his head, picked it up, and laid it across his knees. “I suspect I may miss a lecture tomorrow evening,” he said to the ceiling. “It was to be on the subject ‘Punks and Post-literates: American Writ-ing in the Twenty-first Century.’ I shall have to return the advance. ’sad, sad, sad, George and Martha.’ That’s from-”
“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf…” Mary said. “Ed-ward Albee. We’re not all bozos on this bus.”
“Sorry,” Johnny said, sounding startled.
“Just be sure to put the apology in your journal,” she said, without the slightest idea of what she was talking about. He lowered his head to look at her, frowned for a moment, then started laughing. After a moment, Mary joined him. Then David was also laughing, and Ralph joined in. His was surprisingly high-pitched for a big man, a kind of cartoon tee-bee, and thinking that made Mary laugh even harder. It hurt her scraped stomach, but the hurt didn’t stop her.
Steve pounded on the back of the cab. It was impossible to tell if his muffled voice was amused or alarmed “What’s going on.”
In his best lion’s voice, Johnny Marinville roared back “Be quiet, you Texas longhorn!
We’re discussing litera ture back here!”
Mary screamed with laughter, one hand pressed to the base of her throat, the other curled against her throbbing belly. She wasn’t able to stop until the truck reached the crest of the embankment, crossed the rim, and started down the far side. Then all the humor went out of her at once. The others stopped at about the same time.
“Do you feel it.” David asked his father.
“I feel something.”
Mary started shivering. She tried to remember if she had been shivering before, while she was laughing, and couldn’t. They felt something, yes, she had no doubt that they did.
They might have felt even more if they had been out here earlier, if they’d had to get up this same road before the bleeding thing just behind could—Push it out of your head, Mare. Push it out and lock the door.
“Mary.” David asked.
She looked at him.
“It won’t be much longer.”
“Good.”
Five minutes later-very long minutes-the truck stopped and the cab doors opened. Steve and Cynthia came around to the back. “Hop out, you guys,” Steve said “Last stop.”
Mary worked herself out of the truck, wincing at every move. She hurt all over, but her legs were the worst. If she had sat in the back of the truck much longer, she reckoned she probably wouldn’t have been able to walk at all.
“Johnny, do you still have those aspirin.”
He handed them over. She took three, washing them down with the last of her Jolt. Then she walked around to the front of the truck.
They were at the bottom of the China Pit, first time for the others, second for her. The field office was near; looking at it, thinking of what was inside and of how close she had probably come to ending her existence in there, made her feel like screaming. Then her eyes fixed on the cruiser, the driver’s door still open, the hood still raised, the air-cleaner still lying by the left front tire.
“Put your arm around me,” she told Johnny.
He did, looking down at her with a raised eyebrow.
“Now walk me over to that car.”
“Why.”
“There’s something I have to do.”
“Mary, the sooner we start, the sooner we finish,” David said.
“This’ll only take a second. Come on, Shakespeare. Let’s go.”
He walked her over to the car, his arm around her waist, the.30-.06 in his free hand. She supposed he could feel her trembling, but that was all right. She nerved herself, gnawing at her lower lip, remembering the ride into town in the back of this car. Sitting with Peter behind the mesh. Smelling Old Spice and the metallic scent of her own fear. No doorhandles. No window-cranks. And nothing to look at but the back of Entragian’ s sunburned neck and that stupid blank-eyed bear stuck to the dashboard.
She leaned into Entragian’s stink-except it was really Tak ’s stink, she knew that now—and ripped the bear off the dashboard. Now its blank can toi eyes stared directly up at hers, as if asking her what all this foolishness could possibly be about, what good it could possibly accom-plish, what evil it cojild possibly change.
“Well,” she told it, “you ’re gone, motherfucker, and that’s step one.” She dropped it to the rough surface of the pit and then stamped down on it. Hard. She felt it crunch under her sneaker. It was, in some fundamental way, the most satisfying moment of the whole miserable nightmare.
“Don’t tell me,” Johnny said. “It’s some new variation of est therapy. A symbolic affirmation expressly designed for stressful life-passages, sort of an ‘I’m okay, you’re stomped to shit’ kind of thing. Or-”
“Shut up,” she said, not unkindly. “And you can let loose of me now.”
“Do I have to.” His hand moved on her waist. “I was just getting familiar with the topography.”
“Too bad I’m not a map.”
Johnny dropped his hand and they walked back to the others.
“David.” Steve asked. “Is that the place.”
He pointed past the cluster of heavy machinery and to the left of the rusty Quonset with the stove-stack. About—twenty yards up the slope was the squarish hole she had seen earlier. Then she hadn’t given it much consideration, as she’d had other fish to fry—staying alive, chiefly-but now looking at it gave her a bad feeling. A weak-in the knees feeling. Well, she thought, I did the bear, anyway it’ll never stare at anyone else cooped up in the back of that police-cruiser There’s that much.
“That’s it,” David said. “China Shaft.”
“Can tak in can tah,” his father said, as if in a dream “Yes.”
“And we have to blow it up.” Steve asked. “Just how do we go about that.”
David pointed to the concrete cube near the field office “First we have to get inside there.”
They walked over to the powder magazine. Ralph yanked at the padlock on the door, as if to get the feel of it, then racked the Ruger. The metallic clack-clack sound it made was very loud in the stillness of the pit. “The rest of you stand back,” he said. “This always works great in the movies, but in real life, who knows.”
Wait a sec, wait a sec,” Johnny said, and ran back to the Ryder truck. They heard him rummaging through the cartons of stuff just behind the cab, then: “Oh! There you are, you ugly thing.”
He came back carrying a black Bell motorcycle helmet with a full face-shield. He handed it to Ralph. “Brain bucket deluxe. I hardly ever wear this one, because there’s too much of it. I get it over my head and my claus trophobia kicks in. Put it on.”
Ralph did. The helmet made him look like a futuristic welder. Johnny stepped back from him as he turned to the lock again. So did the others. Mary had her hands on David’s shoulders.
“Why don’t you guys turn around.” Ralph said. His voice was muffled by the helmet.
Mary kept expecting David to protest-concern for his father, perhaps even exaggerated concern, wouldn’t be unusual, given the fact that he had lost the other two members of his family in the last twelve hours-but David said nothing. His face was only a pale blur in the dark, impossible to read, but she sensed no agitation in him. Certainly the shoulders under her hands were calm enough, at least for now.