“Holy shit,” the cop muttered. His right hand, the one below the bloodstained cuff and sleeve, went up to his right cheek. For one bizarre moment he looked to Johnny like a pro football lineman doing a Jack Benny riff. “Ho lee shit.”
“What’s the trouble, Officer.” Johnny asked. He was, with some difficulty, suppressing a smile. One thing hadn’t changed over the years: he loved to be recognized God, how he loved it.
“You’re… JohnEdwardMarinville!” the cop gasped, running it all together, as if he really had only one name, like Pele or Cantinflas. The cop was now starting to grin himself, and Johnny thought, Oh Mr. Policeman, what big teeth you have. “I mean, you are, aren’t you. You wrote Delight! And, oh shit, Song of the Hammer! I’m standing right next to the guy who wrote Song of the Hammer!” And then he did something which Johnny found genu-inely endearing: reached out and touched the sleeve of his motorcycle jacket, as if to prove that the man wearing it was actually real. “Ho-lee shit!”
“Well, yes, I’m Johnny Marinville,” he said, speaking in the modest tones he reserved for these occasions (and these occasions only, as a rule). “Although I have to tell you that I’ve never been recognized by someone who’s just watched me take a leak by the side of the road.”
“Oh, forget that,” the cop said, and seized Johnny s hand. For just a moment before the cop’s fingers closed over his, Johnny saw that the man’s hand was also smeared with half-dried blood; both lifeline and loveline stood out a dark, liverish red.
Johnny tried to keep his smile in place as they shook, and thought he did pretty well, but he was aware that the corners of his mouth seemed to have gained weight. It’s getting on me, he thought. And there won’t be anyplace to wash it off before Aust in…
“Man,” the cop was saying, “you are one of my favorite writers! I mean, gosh, Song of the Hammer… I know the critics didn’t like it, but what do they know.”
“Not much,” Johnny said. He wished the cop would let go of his hand, but the cop was apparently one of those people who shook for punctuation and emphasis as well as greeting. Johnny could feel the latent strength in the cop’s grip; if the big guy squeezed down, his favorite writer would be keyboarding his new book lefthanded, at least for the first month or two.
“Not much, damned straight! Song of the Hammer’s the best book about Vietnam I ever read. Forget Tim O’Brien, Robert Stone—”
“Well, thank you, thanks very much.”
The cop finally loosened his grip and Johnny retrieved his hand. He wanted to look down at it, see how much blood was on it, but this clearly wasn’t the time. The cop was sticking his abused notepad into his back pocket again and staring at Johnny in a wide—eyed, intense way that was actually a little disturbing. It was as if he feared Johnny would disappear like a mirage if he so much as blinked.
“What are you doing out here, Mr. Marinville. Gosh! I thought you lived back East!”
“Well, I do, but—”
“And this is no kind of transportation for a… a… well, I’ve got to say it: for a national resource. Why, do you realize what the ratio of drivers-to-accidents on motorcycles is.
Computed on a road-hours basis. I can tell you that because I’m a wolf and we get a circular every month from the National Safety Council. It’s one accident per four hundred and sixty drivers per day. That sounds good, I know, until you consider the ratio of dri-vers-to-accidents on passenger vehicles. That’s one in twenty-seven thousand per day. That’s some big differ-ence. It makes you think, doesn’t it.”
“Yes.” Thinking, Did he say something about being a wolj did I hear that. “Those statistics are pretty… pretty Pretty what. Come on, Marinviile, get it together. If you can spend an hour with a hostile bitch from Ms. magazine and still not take a drink, surely you can deal with this guy. He’s only trying to show his con-cern for you, after all.
“They’re pretty impressive,” he finished.
“So what are you doing out here. And on such an unsafe mode of transportation.”
“Gathering material.” Johnny found his eyes dropping to the cop’s blood-stiffened right sleeve and forcibly dragged them back up to his sunburned face. He doubted if many of the people on this guy’s beat gave him a hard time: he looked like he could eat nails and spit razor-wire, even though he really didn’t have the right skin for this climate.
“For a new novel.” The cop was excited. Johnny looked briefly at the man’s chest, hunting for a name—tag, but there was none.
“Well, a new book, anyway. Can I ask you something, Officer.”
“Sure, yeah, but I ought to be asking you the questions, I got about a gajillion of em. I never thought… out in the middle of nowhere and I meet… ho-lee shit!”
Johnny grinned. It was hotter than hell out here and he wanted to get moving before Steve was on his ass—he hated looking into the rearview and seeing that big yellow truck back there, it broke the mood, somehow—but it was hard not to be moved by the man’s artless enthusiasm, especially when it was directed at a subject which Johnny himself regarded with respect, wonder, and yes. awe.
“Well, since you’re obviously familiar with my work, what would you think of a book of essays about life in contemporary America.”
“By you.”
“By me. A kind of loose travelogue called”—he took a deep breath—“Travels with Harley”.
He was prepared for the cop to look puzzled, or to guffaw the way people did at the punchline of a joke. The cop did neither. He simply looked back down at the tail-light of Johnny’s bike, one hand rubbing his chin (it was the chin of a Bernie Wrightson comic—book hero, square and cleft), brow furrowed, considering carefully. Johnny took the opportunity to peek surreptitiously at his own hand. There was blood on it, all right, quite a lot. Mostly on the back and smeared across the fingernails. Uck.
Then the cop looked up and stunned him by saying exactly what Johnny himself had been thinking over the last two days of monotonous desert driving. “It could work,” he said, “but the cover ought to be a photo of you on your drag, here. A serious picture, so folks’d know you weren’t trying to make fun of John Steinbeck… or your own self, for that matter.”
“That’s it!” Johnny cried, barely restraining himself from clapping the big cop on the back. “That’s the great danger, that people should go in thinking it’s some kind of… of weird joke. The cover should convey seriousness of purpose… maybe even a certain grimness… what would you think of just the bike. A photo of the bike, maybe sepia—toned. Sitting in the middle of some country highway… or even out here in the desert, on the center-line of Highway 50… shadow stretching off to the side The absurdity of having this discussion out here, with a towering cop who had been about to issue him a warning for pissing on the tumbleweeds, wasn’t lost on him, but it didn’t cut into his excitement, either.
And once again the cop told him exactly what he wanted to hear.
“No! Good gosh, no. It’s got to be you.”
“Actually, I think so, too,” Johnny said. “Sitting on the bike… maybe with the kickstand down and my feet up on the pegs… casual, you know… casual, but…
… but real,” the cop said. He looked up at Johnny, his gray eyes forbidding, then back down at the bike again. “Casual but real. No smile. Don’t you dare smile, Mr.
Marinville.”
“No smile,” Johnny agreed, thinking, This guy is a genius.
“And a little distant,” the cop said. “Looking off. Like you were thinking of all the miles you’d been—”
“Yeah, and all the miles I’ve still got to go.” Johnny looked up at the horizon to get a feel for that look—the old warrior gazing west, a Cormac McCarthy kind of deal—and again saw the vehicle parked off the road a mile or two up. His long-range vision was still pretty good, and the sunglare had shifted enough for him to be almost sure it was an RV.