Стивен Кинг - Desperation

Billingsley, who turned out to have all sorts of opinions on all sorts of issues, once you got him wound up a little. You’re a late—stage alcoholic, aren’t you, my friend. Johnny thought. You’ve got all the bells and whistles.

If so, the man was operating well for one who hadn’t had a shot in awhile. Johnny wanted something to reduce the throb in his nose, and he suspected that getting a drink into old Tommy at the same time might be an investment in their future.

They were passing beneath the battered awning of Des-peration’s Owl’s Club. “Hold it,”

Johnny said. “Going in here for a minute.”

“Are you nuts.” Mary asked. “We have to get off the street!”

“There’s nobody on the street but us,” Johnny said, “didn’t you notice.” He moderated his voice, tried to sound reasonable. “Look, I just want to get some aspirin. My nose is killing me. Thirty seconds-a minute, max.”

He tried the door before she could answer. It was locked. He hit the glass with the rifle butt, actually looking forward to the bray of the burglar alarm, but the only sound was the tinkle of glass falling onto the floor inside and the relentless howl of the wind. Johnny knocked out the few jagged bits of glass sticking up from the side of the doorframe, then reached through and felt for the lock.

“Look,” Ralph murmured. He pointed across the street. Four coyotes stood on the sidewalk in front of a squat brick building with the word UTILITY printed on one window and WATER on the other. They didn’t move, but their eyes were trained on the little cluster of people across the street. A fifth came trotting down the sidewalk from the south and joined them.

Mary raised the Rossi and pointed it toward the coy-otes. David Carver pushed it down again. His face was distant, abstracted. “No, it’s all right,” he said. “They’re just watching.”

Johnny found the lock, turned it, and opened the door The light-switches were to the left.

They turned on a bank of old-fashioned fluoreseents, the kind that look like inverted ice—cube trays. These illuminated a little restau rant area (deserted), a cluster of slot machines (dark), and a pair of blackjack tables. Hanging from one of the light fixtures was a parrot.

Johnny at first thought it must be stuffed, but when he got a little closer, he observed the bulging eyes and the splatter of mixed blood and guano on the wood below it. It was real enough. Someone had strung it up.

Entragian must not have liked the way it said “Polly want a cracker,” Johnny thought.

The Owl’s smelled of old hamburgers and beer. At the far end of the room was a little shopping area. Johnny took a large bottle of generic aspirin, then went behind the bar.

“Hurry up!” Mary cried at him. “Hurry up, can’t you7 “Right there,” he said. A man in dark pants and a shirt that had once been white was lying on the dirty linoleum floor, staring up at Johnny with eyes as glassy as those of the hanged parrot. The bartender, from the look of his clothes. His throat had been cut.

Johnny pulled a quart of Jim Beam off the shelf.

He held it up to the light for a moment, checking the level, then hurried out. A thought—not a nice one-tried to surface and he shoved it back down. Hard. He wanted to lubricate the old horse-doctor, that was all, keep him loose. When you got right down to it, it was an act of Christian charity.

You ’re nwre than a sweetheart, Terry said inside his head. You’re really a saint, aren’t you. St. John the Lubricator. And then her cynical laughter.

Shut up, bitch, he thought… but as always, Terry was reluctant to go.

Be coot, Steven, he told himself. It’s the only way you’ll get out of this. If you panic, I think there’s a good chance both of you are going to die in this goddam rented truck.

He put the transmission in reverse, and, steering by the outside mirror (he didn’t dare open his door and lean out; it would be too easy for a dive-bombing buzzard to break his neck), began to move backward. The wind had picked up again, but he could still hear the crunching from under the truck as they rolled over the scorpions. It reminded him of how cereal sounded when you were chewing it.

Don’t drive off the side, for Christ’s sake don’t do that.

“They’re not following,” Cynthia said. The relief in her voice was unmistakable.

He took a look, saw that she was right, and stopped. He had backed up about fifty feet, far enough so that the lead trailer across the road was just a vague shape in the blowing sand again. He could see brown blotches against the whitish-gray sand in the road.

Squashed scorpions. From here they looked like pats of cowdung. And the others were retreating. In another moment he would find it hard to believe they had been there at all.

Oh, they were, he thought. If you start doubting that, old buddy, all you have to do is take a look at the dead bird currently blocking the air-vents at the bottom of the windshield.

“What do we do now.” she asked.

“I don’t know.” He looked out his window and saw the Desert Rose Cafe. Half of its pink awning had come down in the wind. He looked out the other window, past Cyn-thia, and saw a vacant lot with three boards nailed across the entrance. KEEP OUT OF HERE had been painted across the center board in sloppy white capitals, presumably by someone who didn’t believe in Western hospitality.

“Something wants to keep us in town,” she said. “You know that, don’t you.”

He backed the Ryder truck into the parking lot of the Desert Rose, trying to think of a plan. What came instead was a series of disjointed images and words. The doll lying face-down at the bottom of the RV’s steps. The Tractors, saying her name was Emergency and her tele-phone number was 911. Johnny Cash, saying he built it one piece at a time. Bodies on hooks, a tigerfish swim-ming between the fingers of the hand at the bottom of the aquarium, the baby’s bib, the snake on the kitchen counter under the microwave.

He realized he was on the edge of panic, maybe on the edge of doing something really stupid, and groped for anything that would pull him back from the edge, get him thinking straight again. What came to his mind, unbidden, was something he never would have expected. It was an image-clearer than any of the preceding ones-of the piece of stone sculpture they had seen on the computer table in the mining corporation’s Quonset. The coyote with the strange, twisted head and the starting eyeballs, the coyote whose tongue had been a snake.

There ought to be a picture of that thing next to ugly in the dictionary, Cynthia had said, and she was right about that, oh yes, no question, but Steve was suddenly over-whelmed by the idea that anything that ugly also had to be powerful.

Are you kidding. he thought distractedly. The radio turned on and off when you touched it, the lights flick-ered, the aquarium fucking exploded. Of course it’s powerful.

“What was that little piece of statuary we found back there.” he asked. “What was up with that.”

“I don’t know. I only know that when I touched it…

“What. When you touched it, what.”

“It seemed like I remembered every rotten thing that ever happened to me in my life,” she said. “Sylvia Mar-cucci spitting on me in the eighth grade, out in the play-ground-she said I stole her boyfriend, and I didn’t even know who the hell she was talking about. The time my dad got drunk at my Aunt Wanda’s second wedding and felt my ass while we were dancing and pretended it was a mistake. Like his hardon was a mistake, too.” Her hand crept to the side of her head. “Gettin yelled at. Gettin dumped on. Richie Judkins, almost ripping my fuckin ear off. I thought of all those things.”