And there won’t be anyplace to wash it off before Aust in…
“Man,” the cop was saying, “you are one of my favorite writers! I mean, gosh, Song of the Hammer… I know the critics didn’t like it, but what do they know.”
“Not much,” Johnny said. He wished the cop would let go of his hand, but the cop was apparently one of those people who shook for punctuation and emphasis as well as greeting. Johnny could feel the latent strength in the cop’s grip; if the big guy squeezed down, his favorite writer would be keyboarding his new book lefthanded, at least for the first month or two.
“Not much, damned straight! Song of the Hammer’s the best book about Vietnam I ever read. Forget Tim O’Brien, Robert Stone—”
“Well, thank you, thanks very much.”
The cop finally loosened his grip and Johnny retrieved his hand. He wanted to look down at it, see how much blood was on it, but this clearly wasn’t the time. The cop was sticking his abused notepad into his back pocket again and staring at Johnny in a wide—eyed, intense way that was actually a little disturbing. It was as if he feared Johnny would disappear like a mirage if he so much as blinked.
“What are you doing out here, Mr. Marinville. Gosh! I thought you lived back East!”
“Well, I do, but—”
“And this is no kind of transportation for a… a… well, I’ve got to say it: for a national resource. Why, do you realize what the ratio of drivers-to-accidents on motorcycles is.
Computed on a road-hours basis. I can tell you that because I’m a wolf and we get a circular every month from the National Safety Council. It’s one accident per four hundred and sixty drivers per day. That sounds good, I know, until you consider the ratio of dri-vers-to-accidents on passenger vehicles. That’s one in twenty-seven thousand per day. That’s some big differ-ence. It makes you think, doesn’t it.”
“Yes.” Thinking, Did he say something about being a wolj did I hear that. “Those statistics are pretty… pretty Pretty what. Come on, Marinviile, get it together. If you can spend an hour with a hostile bitch from Ms. magazine and still not take a drink, surely you can deal with this guy. He’s only trying to show his con-cern for you, after all.
“They’re pretty impressive,” he finished.
“So what are you doing out here. And on such an unsafe mode of transportation.”
“Gathering material.” Johnny found his eyes dropping to the cop’s blood-stiffened right sleeve and forcibly dragged them back up to his sunburned face. He doubted if many of the people on this guy’s beat gave him a hard time: he looked like he could eat nails and spit razor-wire, even though he really didn’t have the right skin for this climate.
“For a new novel.” The cop was excited. Johnny looked briefly at the man’s chest, hunting for a name—tag, but there was none.
“Well, a new book, anyway. Can I ask you something, Officer.”
“Sure, yeah, but I ought to be asking you the questions, I got about a gajillion of em. I never thought… out in the middle of nowhere and I meet… ho-lee shit!”
Johnny grinned. It was hotter than hell out here and he wanted to get moving before Steve was on his ass—he hated looking into the rearview and seeing that big yellow truck back there, it broke the mood, somehow—but it was hard not to be moved by the man’s artless enthusiasm, especially when it was directed at a subject which Johnny himself regarded with respect, wonder, and yes. awe.
“Well, since you’re obviously familiar with my work, what would you think of a book of essays about life in contemporary America.”
“By you.”
“By me. A kind of loose travelogue called”—he took a deep breath—“Travels with Harley”.
He was prepared for the cop to look puzzled, or to guffaw the way people did at the punchline of a joke. The cop did neither. He simply looked back down at the tail-light of Johnny’s bike, one hand rubbing his chin (it was the chin of a Bernie Wrightson comic—book hero, square and cleft), brow furrowed, considering carefully. Johnny took the opportunity to peek surreptitiously at his own hand. There was blood on it, all right, quite a lot. Mostly on the back and smeared across the fingernails. Uck.
Then the cop looked up and stunned him by saying exactly what Johnny himself had been thinking over the last two days of monotonous desert driving. “It could work,” he said, “but the cover ought to be a photo of you on your drag, here. A serious picture, so folks’d know you weren’t trying to make fun of John Steinbeck… or your own self, for that matter.”
“That’s it!” Johnny cried, barely restraining himself from clapping the big cop on the back. “That’s the great danger, that people should go in thinking it’s some kind of… of weird joke. The cover should convey seriousness of purpose… maybe even a certain grimness… what would you think of just the bike. A photo of the bike, maybe sepia—toned. Sitting in the middle of some country highway… or even out here in the desert, on the center-line of Highway 50… shadow stretching off to the side The absurdity of having this discussion out here, with a towering cop who had been about to issue him a warning for pissing on the tumbleweeds, wasn’t lost on him, but it didn’t cut into his excitement, either.
And once again the cop told him exactly what he wanted to hear.
“No! Good gosh, no. It’s got to be you.”
“Actually, I think so, too,” Johnny said. “Sitting on the bike… maybe with the kickstand down and my feet up on the pegs… casual, you know… casual, but…
… but real,” the cop said. He looked up at Johnny, his gray eyes forbidding, then back down at the bike again. “Casual but real. No smile. Don’t you dare smile, Mr.
Marinville.”
“No smile,” Johnny agreed, thinking, This guy is a genius.
“And a little distant,” the cop said. “Looking off. Like you were thinking of all the miles you’d been—”
“Yeah, and all the miles I’ve still got to go.” Johnny looked up at the horizon to get a feel for that look—the old warrior gazing west, a Cormac McCarthy kind of deal—and again saw the vehicle parked off the road a mile or two up. His long-range vision was still pretty good, and the sunglare had shifted enough for him to be almost sure it was an RV.
“Literal and metaphorical miles.”
“Yep, both kinds,” this amazing cop said. “Travels with Harley. I like it. It’s ballsy. And of course, I’d read any-thing you wrote, Mr. Marinville. Novels, essays, poems hell, your laundry list.”
“Thanks,” Johnny said, touched. “I appreciate that. You’ll probably never know how much. The last year or so has been difficult for me. A lot of doubt.
Questioning my own identity, and my purpose.”
“I know a little about those things myself,” the cop said. “You might not think so, guy like me, but I do. Why, if you knew the day I’ve put in already… Mr. Mar-inville, could I possibly have your autograph.”
“Of course, it would be a pleasure,” Johnny said, and took his own pad out of his back pocket. He opened it and paged past notes, directions, route numbers, frag-ments of map in blurred soft pencil (these latter had been drawn by Steve Ames, who had quickly realized that his famous client, although still able to ride his cycle with a fair degree of safety, ended up lost and fuming in even small cities without help). At last he found a blank page. “What’s your name, Offi—”
He was interrupted by a long, trembling howl that chilled his blood… not just because it was clearly the sound of a wild animal but because it was close. The notepad dropped from his hand and he turned on his heels so quickly that he staggered. Standing just off the south edge of the road, not fifty yards away, was a mangy canine with thin legs and scanty, starved-looking sides. Its gray pelt was tangled with burdocks and there was an ugly red sore on its foreleg, but Johnny barely noticed these things. What fascinated him was the creature’s muzzle, which seemed to be grinning, and its yellow eyes, which looked both stupid and cunning.
“My God,” he murmured. “What’s that. Is it a—”
“Coyote,” the cop said, pronouncing it ki-yote. “Some people out here call em desert wolves.”
That’s what he said, Johnny thought. Something about seeing a coyote, a desert wolf You just misunderstood. This idea relieved him even though a part of his mind didn’t believe it at all.
The cop took a step toward the coyote, then another. He paused, then took a third. The coyote stood its ground but began to shiver all over. Urine squirted from under its chewed-looking flank. A gust of wind turned the paltry stream into a scatter of droplets.
When the cop took a fourth step toward it, the coyote raised its scuffed muzzle and howled again, a long, ulu-lating sound that made Johnny’s arms ripple with goose-flesh and his balls pull up.
“Hey, don’t get it going,” he said to the cop. “That’s tres creepy.
The cop ignored him. He was looking at the coyote, which was now looking intently back at him with its yellow gaze. “Tak,” the cop said. “Tak ah lah.”
The wolf went on staring at him, as if it understood this Indian-sounding gibberish, and the goosebumps on Johnny’s arms stayed up. The wind gusted again, blowing his dropped notepad over onto the shoulder of the road, where it came to rest against a jutting chunk of rock. Johnny didn’t notice. His pad and the autograph he’d intended to give the cop were, for the moment, the fur-thest things from his mind.
This goes in the hook, he thought. Everything else I’ve seen is still up for grabs, but this goes in. Rock solid. Rock goddam solid.
“Tak,” the cop said again, and clapped his hands together sharply, once. The coyote turned and loped away, running on those scrawny legs with a speed Johnny never would have expected. The big man in the khaki urn—form watched until the coyote’s gray pelt had merged into the general dirty gray of the desert. It didn’t take long.
“Gosh, aren’t they ugly.” tbe cop said. “And just lately they’re thicker’n ticks on a blanket. You don’t see em in the morning or early afternoon, when it’s hottest, but late afternoon… evening… toward dark…” He shook his head as if to say There you go.
“What did you say to it.” Johnny asked. “That was amazing. Was it Indian. Some Indian dialect.”
The big cop laughed. “Don’t know any Indian dialect,” he said. “Hell, don’t know any Indians. That was just baby-talk, like oogie-woogie, snookie-wookums.”
“But it was iistening to you!”
“No, it was looking at me,” the cop said, and gave Johnny a rather forbidding frown, as if he were daring the other man to contradict him. “I stole its eyes, that’s all. The holes of its eyes. I suppose most of that animal-tamer stuff is for the birds, but when it comes to slinkers like desert wolves… well, if you steal their eyes, it doesn’t matter what you say. They’re usually not dangerous unless they’re rabid, anyway. You just don’t want them to smell fear on you. Or blood.”
Johnny glanced at the big cop’s right sleeve again and wondered if the blood on it was what had drawn the coyote.
“And you don’t ever, ever want to face them when they’re in a pack. Especially a pack with a strong leader They’re fearless then. They’ll go after an elk and run it until its heart bursts. Sometimes just for the fun of it.” He paused. “Or a man.”
“Really,” Johnny said. “That’s…” He couldn’t say tres creepy, he’d already used that one. “. . fascinating “It is, isn’t it.” the big cop said, and smiled. “Desert lore. Scripture in the wasteland. The resonance of lonely places.”
Johnny stared at him, jaw dropping slightly. All at once his friend the policeman sounded like Paul Bowles on a bad-karma day.
He’s trying to impress you, that’s all—it’s cocktail chatter without the cocktail party.
You ‘ye seen and heard it all a thousand times before.
Maybe. But he still could have done without it in this context. Somewhere off in the distance another howl rose, trembling the air like an auditory heat-haze. It wasn’t the coyote which had just run off, Johnny was sure of that. This howl had come from farther away, perhaps in answer to the first.
“Oh hey, time out!” the cop exclaimed. “You better stow that, Mr. Marinville!”
“Huh.” For one exceedingly strange moment he had the idea the cop was talking about his thoughts, as if he practiced telepathy as well as elliptical pretentiousness, but the big man had turned back to the motorcycle again and was pointing at the lefthand saddlebag.
Johnny saw that one sleeve of his new poncho-bright orange for safety in bad weather—was hanging out of it like a tongue.
How come I didn ‘I see that when I stopped to take a leak. he wondered. How could I have missed it. And there was something else. He’d stopped for gas in Pretty Nice, and after he’d topped the Harley’s tanks, he’d unbuckled that saddlebag to get his Nevada map. He had checked the mileage from there to Austin, then refolded the map and put it back. Then he had rebuckled the saddlebag. He was sure he had, but it was certainly un-buckled now.