“God, please bless this food we are about to eat,” David began.
“Yeah, what there is of it,” Cynthia said, and immedi-ately looked sorry that she had spoken. David didn’t seem to mind, though; might not have even heard her.
“Bless our fellowship, take care of us, and deliver us from evil. Please take care of my mom, too, if it’s your will.” He paused, then said in a lower voice: “It’s probably not, but please, if it’s your will. Jesus’ sake, amen.” He opened his eyes again.
Johnny was moved. The kid’s little prayer had touched him in the very place Entragian had tried and failed to reach.
Sure it did. Because he believes it. In his own humble way, this kid makes Pope John Paul in his fancy clothes and Las Vegas hat look like an Easter-and-Christmas Christian.
David bent over and picked up the stuff he’d found, seeming as cheerful as a soup-kitchen tycoon presiding over Thanksgiving dinner as he rummaged in the bag.
“Here, Mary.” He took out a can of Blue Fjord Fancy Sardines, and handed it to her.
“Key’s on the bottom.”
“Thank you, David.”
He grinned. “Thank Mr. Billingsley’s friend. It’s his food, not mine.” He handed her the crackers. “Pass em—“Take what you need and leave the rest,” Johnny said expansively. “That’s what us Friends of the Circle say… right, Tom.”
The veterinarian gave him a watery gaze and didn’t reply.
David gave a can of sardines to Steve and another to Cynthia.
“Oh, no, honey, that’s okay,” Cynthia said, trying to give hers back. “Me’n Steve can share.”
“No need to,” David said, “there’s plenty. Honest.”
He gave a can to Audrey, a can to Tom, and a can to Johnny. Johnny turned his over twice in his hand, as if trying to make sure it was real, before pulling off the wrapper, taking the key off the back, and inserting it in the tab of metal at the end of the can. He opened it. As soon as he smelled the fish, he was savagely hungry. If anyone had told him he would ever have such a reaction to a lousy can of sardines, he would have laughed.
Something tapped him on the shoulder. It was Mary, holding out the box of crackers. She looked almost ecstatic. Fish-oil ran down from the corner of her mouth to her chin in a shiny little runnel. “Go on,” she said. “They’re wonderful on crackers. Really!”
“Yep,” Cynthia said cheerfully, “everything tastes better when it shits on a Ritz, that’s what I always say.”
Johnny accepted the box, looked in, and saw there was only a single cylinder of waxed paper left, half-full. He took three of the round dark orange crackers. His growling stomach protested this forbearance, and he found himself unable to keep from taking three more before passing the box to Billingsley. Their eyes met for a moment, and he heard the old man saying not even Houdini could have done it that way. Because of the head. And of course there was the phone-three transmission-bars showing when it had been in the kid’s hands, none at all when he had held it in his own.
“This settles it once and for all,” Cynthia said, her mouth full. She sounded the way Mary looked. “Food is way better than sex.”
Johnny looked at David. He was sitting on one arm of his father’s chair, eating. Ralph’s can of sardines sat in his lap, unopened, as the man continued to look out over the rows of empty seats. David took a couple of sardines from his own can, laid them carefully on a cracker, and gave them to his dad, who begaz—to chew mechanically, doing it as if his only goal was to clear his mouth again. Seeing the boy’s expression of attentive love made Johnny uncomfortable, as if he were violating David’s privacy. He looked away and saw the box of crackers on the floor. Everyone was busy eating, and no one paid Johnny any particular attention when he picked up the box and looked into it.
It had gone all the way around the group, everyone had at least half a dozen crackers (Billingsley might have taken even more; the old goat was really cramming them in), but that cylinder of waxed paper was still in there, and Johnny could have sworn that it was still half-full; that the number of crackers in it had not changed at all.
Ralph recounted the crash of the Carver family as clearly as he could, eating sardines between bursts of talk. He was trying to clear his head, trying to come back-for David’s sake more than his own-but it was hard. He kept seeing Kirstie lying motionless at the foot of the stairs, kept seeing Entragian pulling Ellie across the holding area by the arm.
Don’t worry, David, I’ll be back, she had said, but to Ralph, who believed he had heard every turn and lift of Ellie’s voice in their fourteen years of marriage, she had sounded already gone. Still, he owed it to David to try and be here. To come back himself, from wherever it was his shocked, over-stressed-and guilty yes, there was that, too-mind wanted to take him.
But it was hard.
When he had finished, Audrey said: “Okay, no revolt from the animal kingdom, at least.
But I m very sorry about your wife and your little girl, Mr. Carver. You too, David.”
“Thanks,” Ralph said, and when David added, “My mom could still be okay,” he ruffled the boy’s hair and told him yes, that was right.
Mary went next, telling about the Baggie under the spare tire, the way Entragian had mixed “I’m going to kill you” into the Miranda warning, and the way he had shot her husband on the steps, completely without warning or provocation.
“Still no wildlife,” Audrey said. This now seemed to be her central concern. She tilted her sardine-can up to her mouth and drank the last of the fish oil without so much as a flicker of embarrassment.
“You either didn’t hear the part about the coyote he brought upstairs to guard us or you don’t want to hear it Mary said.
Audrey dismissed this with a wave of her hand. She was sitting down now, providing Billingsley with at least another four inches of leg to look at. Ralph was looking, too, but he felt absolutely nothing about what he was seeing. He had an idea there was more juice in some old car batteries than there was in his emotional wiring right now.
“You can domesticate them, you know,” she said “Feed them Gaines-burgers and train them like dogs, in fact.”
“Did you ever see Entragian walking around town with a coyote on a leash.” Marinville asked politely.
She gave him a look and set her jaw. “No. I knew him to speak to, like anyone else in town, but that was all. I spend most of my time in the pit or the lab or out riding I’m not much for town life.”
“What about you, Steve.” Marinville asked. “What’s your tale.”
Ralph saw the rangy fellow with the Texas accent exchange a glance with his girlfriend-if that was what she was-and then look back at the writer. “Well, first off, if you tell your agent I picked up a hitchhiker, I guess I’ll lose my bonus.”
“I think you can consider him the least of your worries at this point. Go on. Tell it.”
They both told it, alternating segments, both clearly aware that the things they had seen and experienced upped the ante of belief considerably. They both ex-pressed frustration at their inability to articulate how awful the stone fragment in the lab! storage area had been, how powerfully it had affected them, and neither seemed to want to come out and say what had happened when the wolf (they agreed that that was what it had been, not a coyote) brought the fragment out of the lab and laid it before them. Ralph had an idea it was something sexual, although what could be so bad about that he didn’t know.
“Still a doubting Thomas.” Marinville asked Audrey when Steve and Cynthia had finished. He spoke mildly, as if he did not want her to feel threatened. Of course he doesn’t want her to feel threatened, Ralph thought. There’s only seven of us, he wants us all on the same team. And he’s really not too bad at it.