Стивен Кинг - Desperation

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.

“I don’t know what I am.” She sounded dazed. “I don’t want to believe any of this shit—just considering it freaks me severely-but I can’t imagine why you’d lie.” She paused, then said thoughtfully: “Unless seeing those people hung up in Hernando’s Hideaway…

I don’t know, scared you so badly that…

“That we started seeing things.” Steve asked.

She nodded. “The snakes you saw in the house-that at least makes sense of a sort. They feel this kind of weather coming as much as three days in advance sometimes, and go for any sheltered place. As for the rest… I don’t know. I’m a scientist, and I can’t see how-”

“Come on, lady, you’re like a kid pretending her mouth is stitched shut so she won’t have to eat the broccoli,” cynthia said. “Everything we saw dovetails with what Mr. Marinville there saw before us, and Mary saw before him and the Carvers saw before them. Right down to the knocked-over piece of picket fence where Entragian greased the barber, or whoever he was. So quit the I’m-a—scientist crap for awhile. We’re all on the same page; you’re the one that’s on a different one.

“But I didn’t see any of these things!” Audrey almost wailed.

“What did you see.” Ralph asked. “Tell us.”

Audrey crossed her legs, tugged at the hem of her dress “I was camping. I had four days off, so I packed up Sally and headed north, into the Copper Range. It’s my favorite place in Nevada.” Ralph thought she looked defensive as if she had taken a ribbing for this sort of behavior in the past.

Billingsley looked as if he had just wakened from a dream… one of having Audrey’s long legs wrapped around his scrawny old butt, perhaps. “Sally,” he said “How is Sally.”

Audrey gave him an uncomprehending look for a moment, then grinned like a girl.

“She’s fine.”

“Strain all better.”

“Yes, thanks. It was good liniment.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“What’re you talking about.” Marinville asked.

“I doctored her horse a year or so back,” Billingsley said. “That’s all.”

Ralph wasn’t sure he would let Billingsley work on his horse, if he had one; he wasn’t sure he would let Billingsley work on a stray cat… But he supposed the vet might have been different a year ago. When you made drinking a career, twelve months could make a lot of changes. Few of them for the better.

“Getting Rattlesnake back on its feet has been pretty stressful,” she said. “Lately it’s been the switchover from rainbirds to emitters. A few eagles died-”

“A few.” Billingsley said. “Come now. I’m no tree hugger, but you can do better than that.”

“All right, about forty, in all. No big deal in terms of the species; there’s no shortage of eagles in Nevada. As you know, Doe. The greens know it, too, but they treat each dead eagle as if it were a boiled baby, just the same What it’s really about-and all it’s about-is trying to stop us from mining the copper. God, they make me so tired sometimes. They come out here in their perky little foreign cars, fifty pounds of American copper in each 7 one, and tell us we’re earth-raping monsters. They-”

“Ma’am.” Steve said softly. “Pardon, but ain’t a one of us folks from Greenpeace.”

“Of course not. What I’m saying is that we all felt bad about the eagles-the hawks and the ravens too, for that matter-in spite of what the treehuggers say.” She looked around at them, as if to evaluate their impression of her honesty, then went on. “We leach copper out of the ground with sulfuric acid. The easiest way to apply it is with rainbirds-they look like big lawn-sprinklers. But rainbirds can leave pools. The birds see them, come down to bathe and drink, then die. It’s not a nice death, either.”