“No!” Mary screamed. “No, get away from him, you ugly fuck! GETAWAY FROM HIM!”
There was a clink. It was followed by a thin rolling—marble sound. David turned his head long enough to see Mary with her hands now outside the bars of her cell. The left was cupped. He saw her pick another coin out of it with her right hand and throw it at the coyote. This time it barely paid attention, although the quarter struck it on the flank. The animal started toward David’s bare feet and legs instead, head lowered, snarling.
Oh Christ almighty, Johnny thought. Goddam kid must have checked his brains at the door.
Then he yanked the belt out of the bottom of his motor-cycle jacket, stuck his arm as far out through the bars as he could, and brought the buckle end down on the 7 coyote’s scant flank just as it was about to help itself to the kid’s right foot.
The coyote yelped in pain as well as surprise this time. It whirled, snatching at the belt.
Johnny yanked it away—it was too thin, too apt to give out in the coyote’s jaws before the kid could get out… if the kid actually could get out, which Johnny doubted. He let the belt go flying over his shoulder and yanked off the heavy leather jacket itself, trying to hold the coyote’s yellow gaze as he did so willing it not to look away. The animal’s eyes reminded him of the cop’s eyes.
The kid shoved his butt through the bars with a gasp, and Johnny had time to wonder how that felt on the old family jewels. The coyote started to turn toward the sound and Johnny flung the leather jacket out at it, holding on by the collar. If the animal hadn’t taken two steps forward to snatch at the belt, the jacket wouldn’t have reached it… — but the coyote had and the jacket did. When it brushed the animal’s shoulder, it whirled and seized the jacket so fiercely that it was almost snapped out of Johnny’s hands. As it was he was dragged head-first into the bars. It hurt like a mother and a bright red rocket went off behind his eyes, but he still had time to be grateful that his nose had gone between the bars rather than into one.
“No, you don’t,” he grunted, winding his hands into the leather collar and pulling. “Come on, hon… come on. you nasty gopher-eating bugger… come on over… and any howdy.”
The coyote snarled bitterly at him, the sound muffled through its mouthful of jacket-twelve hundred bucks at Barneys in New York. Johnny had never quite pictured it like this when he had tried it on.
He bunched his arms-not as powerful as they’d been thirty years ago, but not puny, either-and dragged the coyote foward. Its claws slid on the hardwood floor. It got one front leg braced against the desk and shook the jacket from side to side, trying to yank it out of Johnny’s hands. His collection of Life Savers went flying, his maps, his spare set of keys, his pocket pharmacy (aspirin, codeine caps, Sucrets, a tube of Preparation-H), his sunglasses, and his goddam cellular phone. He let the coyote take a step or two backward, trying to keep it interested, to play it like a fish, then yanked it forward again.
It bonked its head on the corner of the desk this time, a sound that warmed Johnny’s heart. “A rriba!” he grunted. “How’d that feel, honey.”
“Hurry up!” Mary screamed. “Hurry up, David!”
Johnny glanced over at the kid’s cell. What he saw made his muscles relax with fear—when the coyote yanked on the jacket this time, the animal came very close to pulling it free.
“Hurry up!” the woman screamed again, but Johnny saw that the kid couldn’t hurry up.
Soaped up, naked as a peeled shrimp, he had gotten as far as his chin, and there he was stuck, with the whole length of his body out in the holding area and his head back inside the cell. Johnny had one overwhelming impression, mostly called to mind by the twist of the neck and the stressed line of the jaw.
The kid was hung.
He did okay until he got to his head, and there he stuck fast with his cheek on the boards and the shelf of his jaw pressed against one soapy bar and the back of his head against the other. A panic driven by claustrophobia—the smell of the wood floor, the iron touch of the bars, a nightmare memory of a picture he’d once seen of a Puritan in stocks-dimmed his vision like a dark curtain. He could hear his dad shouting, the woman screaming, and the coyote snarling, but those sounds were all far away. His head was stuck, he’d have to go back, only he wasn’t sure he could go back because now his arms were out and one was pinned under him and—God help me, he thought. It didn’t seem like a prayer; it was maybe too scared and up against it to be a prayer. Please help me, don’t let me be stuck, please help me.
Turn your head, the voice he sometimes heard now told him. As always, it spoke in an almost disinterested way, as if the things it was saying should have been self—evident, and as always David recognized it by the way it seemed to pass through him rather than to comefrom him.
An image came to him then: hands pressing the front and back of a book, squeezing the pages together a little in spite of the boards and the binding. Could his head do that.
David thought-or perhaps only hoped-that it could. But he would have to be in the right position.
Turn your head, the voice had said.
From somewhere behind him came a thick ripping sound, then Marinville’s voice, somehow amused, scared, and outraged all at the same time: “Do you know how much that thing cost.”
David twisted around so he lay on his back instead of his side. Just having the pressure of the bar off his jaw was an incredible relief. Then he reached up and placed his palms against the bars.
Is this right.
No answer. So often there was no answer. Why was that.
Because God is cruel, the Reverend Martin who kept school inside his head replied. God is cruel. I have pop-corn, David, why don ‘t I make some. Maybe we can find one of those old horror movies on TV, something Uni-versal, maybe even The Mummy.
He pushed with his hands. At first nothing happened, but then, slowly, slowly, his soapy head began sliding between the bars. There was one terrible moment when he stopped with his ears crushed against the sides of his head and the pressure beating on his temples, a sick throb that was maybe the worst physical hurt he had ever known. In that moment he was sure he was going to stick right where he was and die in agony, like a heretic caught in some Inquisitorial torture device.
He shoved harder with his palms, eyes looking up at the dusty ceiling with ago-nized concentration, and gave a small, relieved moan as he began to move again almost at once.
With the nar-rowest aspect of his skull presented to the bars, he was able to deliver himself into the holding area without too much more trouble. One of his ears was trickling blood, but he was out. He had made it. Naked, covered with foamy greenish curds of Irish Spring soap, David sat up. A monstrous bolt of pain shot through his head from back to. front, and for a moment he felt his eyes were literally bugging out, like those of a cartoon Romeo who has just spotted a dishy blonde.
The coyote was the least of his problems, at least for the time being. God had shut its mouth with a motorcycle jacket. Stuff from the pockets was scattered everywhere, and the jacket itself was torn straight down the middle. A limp rag of saliva-coated black leather hung from the side of the coyote’s muzzle like a well-chewed cheroot.
“Get out, David!” his father cried. His voice was hoarse with tears and anxiety. “Get out while you still can!”
The gray-haired man, Marinville, flicked his eyes up to David momentarily. “He’s right, kid. Get lost.” He looked back down at the snarling coyote. “Come on, Rover, you can do better than that! By Jesus, I’d like to be around when you start shitting zippers by the light of the moon!” He yanked the jacket hard. The coyote came skidding along the floor, head down, neck stretched, forelegs stiff, shaking its narrow head from side to side as it tried to pull the jacket away from Marinville.