Do you or not. Do you or not. Do you or not. Answer me, you smart New York Jew!”
“I do!” Peter cried. “We both do, just watch the road, for Christ’s sake watch where you’re going!”
The cop continued staring back at them through the mesh, face pale, blood dripping down from his lower lip. The Caprice, which had begun to veer to the left, almost all the way across the westbound lane, now slid back the other way.
“Don’t worry about me,” the cop said. His voice was mild again. “Gosh, no. I’ve got eyes in the back of my head. In fact, I’ve got eyes just about everywhere. You’d do well to remember that.”
He turned back suddenly, facing front again, and dropped the cruiser’s speed to an easygoing fifty-five. The seat settled back against Peter’s knees with painful weight, pinning him.
He took Mary’s hands in both of his own. She pressed her face against his chest, and he could feel the sobs she was trying to suppress. They shook through her like wind. He looked over her shoulder, through the mesh. On the dashboard, the bear’s head nodded and bobbed on its spring.
“I see holes like eyes,” the cop said. “My mind is full of them.” He said nothing else until they got to town.
The next ten minutes were very slow ones for Peter Jackson. The cop’s weight against his pinned knees seemed to increase with each circuit of his wristwatch’s second hand, and his lower legs were soon numb. His feet were dead asleep, and he wasn’t sure that he would be able to walk on them if this ride ever ended. His bladder throbbed. His head ached. He understood that he and Mary were in the worst trouble of their lives, but he was unable to comprehend this in any real and meaningful way. Every time he neared comprehension, there was a short circuit in his head. They were on their way back to New York. They were expected. Someone was water-ing their plants. This couldn’t be happening, absolutely could not.
Mary nudged him and pointed out her window. Here was a sign, reading simply DESPERATION. Under the word was an arrow pointing to the right.
The cop slowed, but not much, before making the right. The car started to tip and Peter saw Mary drawing in breath. She was going to scream. He put a hand over her mouth to stop her and whispered in her ear, “He’s got it, I’m pretty sure he does, we’re not going to roll.” But he wasn’t sure until he felt the cruiser’s rear end first slide, then catch hold.
A moment later they were racing south along narrow patched blacktop with no centerline.
Amile or so farther on, they passed a sign which read DESPERATION’s CHURCH & CIVIC ORGANIZATIONS WELCOME YOU! The words CHURCH & CIVIC ORGANIZATIONS were readable, although they had been coated with yellow spray-paint. Above them, in the same paint, the words DEAD DOGS had been added in ragged caps. The churches and civic organizations were listed beneath, but Peter didn’t bother to read them. A German Shepherd had been hanged from the sign.
Its rear paws tick-tocked back and forth an inch or two above a patch of ground that was dark and muddy with its blood.’ Mary’s hands were clamped on his like a vise. He wel-comed their pressure. He leaned toward her again, into the sweet smell of her perfume and the sour smell of her tern—fled sweat, leaned toward her until his lips were pressed against the cup of her ear. “Don’t say a word, don’t make a sound,” he murmured. “Nod your head if you under-stand me.”
She nodded against his lips, and Peter straightened up again.
They passed a trailer park behind a stake fence. Most of the trailers were small and looked as if they had seen better days—around the time Cheers first went on the air, perhaps. Dispirited-looking laundry flapped between a few of them in the hot desert wind. In front of one was a sign which read: I’M A GUN-TOTIN’ SNAPPLE-DRINKIN”
BIBLE-READIN’ CLINTON-BASHIN’ SON OF A BITCH!
NEVER MIND THE DOG, BEWARE OF THE OWNER!
Mounted on an old Airstream which stood near the road was a large black satellite dish.
On the side of it was another sign, white-painted metal down which streaks of rust had run like ancient bloody tears:
THIS TELACOMMUNICATIONS
PROPERTY RATTLESNAKE TRAILER PARK
NO TREESPASSING! POLICE PATROLED!
Beyond the Rattlesnake Trailer Park was a long Quonset hut with rusty, corrugated sides and roof. The sign out front read DESPERATION MINING CORP. To one side was a cracked asphalt parking lot with a dozen cars and pickups in it. A moment later they passed the Desert Rose Cafe.
Then they were in the town proper. Desperation, Nevada, consisted of two streets that crossed at right angles (a blinker-light, currently flashing yellow on all four sides, hung over the intersection) and two blocks of business buildings. Most seemed to have false fronts. There was an Owl’s Club casino and cafe, a grocery, a laundrymat, a bar with a sign in the window reading ENJOY OUR SLOTSPITALITY, hardware and feed stores, a movie theater called The American West, a few others. None of the businesses looked as if they were booming, and the theater had the air of a place that has been closed a long time. A single crooked R hung from its dirty, bashed-in marquee.
Going the other way, east and west, were some frame houses and more trailers. Nothing seemed to be in motion except for the cruiser and one tumbleweed, which moved down Main in large, lazy lopes.
I’d get off the streets, too, if I saw this guy coming, Peter thought. You’re goddamned tooting I would.
Beyond the town was an enormous curving bulwark with an improved dirt road at least four lanes wide run-ning up to the top in a pair of wide switchbacks. The rest of this curved rampart, which had to be at least three hun-dred feet high, was crisscrossed by deep runoff trenches.
To Peter they looked like wrinkles in old skin. At the foot of the crater (he assumed it was a crater, the result of some sort of mining operation), trucks that looked like toys compared to the soaring, wrinkled wall behind them were clustered together by a long, corrugated building with a conveyor belt running out of each end.
Their host spoke up for the first time since telling them his mind was full of holes, or whatever it was he’d said.
“Rattlesnake Number Two. Sometimes known as the China Pit.” He sounded like a tourguide who still enjoys his job. “Old Number Two was opened in 1951, and from ’62 or so right through the seventies, it was the biggest open-pit copper mine in the United States, maybe in the world. Then it played out. They opened it up again year before last.