Desperation

“Too bad,” Joh

“Lips which lie are best kept silent,” the cop said, tossing the hat that wasn’t his over into the passenger seat. It landed on a tangle of meshy stuff that appeared studded with spikes.

The seat, bowed into a tired curve by the cop’s weight, settled against Joh

“Sit up!” Joh

The cop made no reply and the pressure on Joh

He seized it in both hands and tore ii free of the sagging seat-back with an indrawn hiss of effort that pulled blood down his throat and started him dry-heaving for real.

“Bastard!” Joh

“Listen,” he said, allowing none of that sentiment to enter his voice, “I need something for my dose… nose. It’s killing me. Even an aspirin. Do you have an aspirin.”

The cop said nothing. Went on tapping the wheel with his head down, that was all.

Joh

So he kept silent and waited.

Time spun out. The shadows of the mountains grew a bit thicker and moved a bit closer, but the coyotes had fallen silent. The cop sat with his head lowered and his fingers tapping the sides of the wheel, seeming to meditate, not looking up when another semi went by headed east and a car passed them going west, swinging out to give the parked police-cruiser with the ticking roof—flashers a wide berth.

Then he picked up something which had been lying beside him on the front seat: an old—fashioned shotgun with a double-trigger setup. The cop looked at it fixedly. “I guess that woman wasn’t really a folk-singer,” he said, “but she tried her best to kill me, no doubt about that. With this.”

Joh

“You have never written a truly spiritual novel,” the cop told him. He spoke slowly, enunciating each word—with care. “It is your great unrecognized failing, and it is at the center of your petulant, self-indulgent behavior. You have no interest in your spiritual nature. You mock the God who created you, and by doing so you mortify your own pneuma and glorify the mud which is your sarx Do you understand me.”

Joh

The cop solved the dilemma for him. Without looking up from the wheel, without so much as a glance into the rearview mirror, he placed the double barrels of the shot gun on his right shoulder and pointed them back through the wire mesh. Joh

And although the cop still did not look up, the muzzles of the gun tracked him as precisely as a radar-controlled servomotor.

He might have a mirror in his lap, Joh

“Answer me,” the cop said. His voice was dark and brooding. His head was still bent.

The hand not holding the shotgun continued to tap at the wheel, and another gust of wind hammered the cruiser, driving sand and alkali dust against the window in a fine spray.

“Answer me now. I won’t wait. I don’t have to wait. There s always another one coming along. So… do you under stand what I just told you.”

“Yes,” Joh

He moved to the right again. The shotgun muzzles tracked his movements precisely, although he could swear that the springs of the back seat made no sound beneath him and the cop could not see him unless he was using a television monitor or something.

“Don’t toady to me,” the cop said wearily. “That will only make your fate worse.”

“1…” He licked his lips. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

“Sarx is not the body; soma is the body. Sarx is the flesh of the body. The body is made of flesh—as the word was reputedly made flesh by the birth of Jesus Christ—but the body is more than the flesh that makes it. The sum is greater than the parts. Is that so hard for an intellectual such as yourself to understand.”

The shotgun barrel, moving and moving. Tracking like an autogyro.

“I… I never…

“Thought of it that way. Oh please. Even a spiritual na—like you must understand that a chicken di

His voice had thickened and now he was hitching in breath, trying to talk as a person does only when trying to finish his thought before the sneeze arrives. He abruptly dropped the shotgun onto the seat again, gasped in a deep breath (the abused seat creaked backward, almost pi

This stuff—raw tissue from the big cop’s throat and sinuses—hit the windshield, the steering wheel, the dashboard. The smell was awful, the smell of rotted meat.

Joh

“Gosh, there’s nothing worse than a summer cold, is there.” the cop asked in his dark, musing voice. He cleared his throat and spat a clot the size of a crabapple onto the face of the dashboard. It hung where it was for a moment, then oozed down the front of the police-radio like an unspeakable snail, leaving a trail of blood behind.

It hung briefly from the bottom of the radio, then dropped 2 to the floormat with a plop.

Joh

“That was sarx, the cop said, and started the engine. “You might want to keep it in mind.

I’d say ‘for your next book,’ but don’t think there’s going to be a next book, do you, Mr.

Marinville.”

Joh

The cop hauled the Caprice cruiser around in a U, pointing it east. Joh

Coyotes sat along the roadside at fifty-foot intervals like an honor guard—silent, yellow—eyed, tongues lolling. They appeared to be gri