Desperation

“You’re quite a one, aren’t you.” the cop breathed. ‘You’re quite a one indeed. Yes, I think so.”

Think whatever you want, just don’t think about me thinking about the shotgun shell.

The cop’s eyes widened slightly, and for a hideous moment David thought that was exactly what the cop was thinking about, that be had tuned into David’s mind as if it were a radio signal. Then a coyote howled outside, a outside the door of the room Brian was in. David had shaken his head. He was still powerfully in the grip of the feeling which had more or less swallowed him since his pallid mother had given him the news about the accident: that feeling of being guided by someone more experi-enced than he was, someone who would be brave for him if his own courage faltered.

He had gone into the room. Mr. and Mrs. Ross were there, sitting in red vinyl chairs.

They had books in their hands that they weren’t reading. Brian was in the bed by the window, surrounded by equipment that beeped and sent green lines rolling across video screens. A light blanket was pulled up to his waist. Above it, a thin white hospital shirt lay open like cheesy school-play angel’s wings on either side of his chest. There were all sorts of rubber suckers on him down there, and more attached to his head, below a vast white cap of bandage. From beneath this cap, one long cut descended Brian’s left cheek to the corner of his mouth, where it curved up like a fishhook. The cut had been sutured with black thread. To David it had looked like something out of a Frankenstein movie, one of the old ones with Boris Karloff they showed on Saturday nights. Sometimes, when he slept over at Brian’s, the two of them stayed up and ate pop-corn and watched those movies. They loved the old black—and-white monsters. Once, during The Mummy, Brian had turned to David and said, “Oh shit, the mummy’s after us, let’s all walk a little faster.” Stupid, but at quarter to one in the morning, anything can strike eleven-year-olds fu

Brian’s eyes had looked up at him from the hospital bed. And through him. They were open and as empty as school classrooms in August.

Feeling more than ever as if he were not moving but being moved, David had walked into the magic circle of the machines. He observed the suction cups on Brian’s chest and temples. He observed the wires coming out of the suction cups. He observed the oddly misshapen look of the helmet-sized bandage on the left side of Brian’s head, as if the shape beneath it had been radically changed. David supposed it had been. When you hit the side of a brick house, something had to give. There was a tube in Brian’s right arm and another coming out of his chest. The tubes went to bags of liquid hanging off poles There was a plastic doodad in Brian’s nose and a band on, his wrist.

David thought, These are the machines that are keeping him alive. And when they turn them off when they pull out the needles—Disbelief filled him at the idea, buds of wonder which were only grief rolled tight. He and Brian squirted each other at the waterfountain outside their home room at school whenever they thought they could get away with it They rode their bikes in the fabled Bear Street Woods pretending they were commandos. They swapped books and comics and baseball cards and sometimes just sat on David’s back porch, playing with Brian’s Gameboy or reading and drinking David’s mom’s lemonade. They slapped each other high fives and called each other “bad boy.”

(Sometimes, when it was just the two of them, they called each other “fuckhead” or “dickweed.”) In the second grade they’d pricked their fingers with pins and smooshed them together and sworn themselves blood brothers. In August of this year they had made, with Mark Ross’s help, a bottlecap Parthenon from a picture in a book. It turned out so well that Mark kept it in the down stairs hail and showed it to company. At the first of the year the bottlecap Parthenon was slated to travel the block and a half to the Carver house.

It was the Parthenon that David’s mind had fixed upon most firmly as he stood by his comatose friend’s bed They had built it—him, Brian, Brian’s dad—out in the Ross garage while the tape player endlessly recycled Rattle and Hum on the shelf behind them.

A silly thing because it was just bottlecaps, a cool thing because it looked like what it was supposed to look like, you could tell what it was. Also a cool thing because they had made it with their own hands. And soon Brian’s hands would be picked up and scrubbed by an undertaker who would use a special brush and pay particular attention to the finger nails. No one would want to look at a corpse with dirty nails, David supposed. And after Bri’s hands were clean and he was in the coffin his folks would pick out for him the undertaker would lace his fingers together like they were a pair of sneakers. And that was how they’d stay head somberly, as if the rest was too awful to be spoken aloud.

You lie, you liar, David thought… but then another howl drifted through the open window in the stairwell, and he wondered.

“In any case,” the cop said, “these are good locks and good cells. They were built by hardasses for roughneck miners, and escape’s not an option. If that’s been in your mind, send it home to its momma. You mind me, now. That’s the best thing to do. Believe me, it is.” Then he was gone, this time for real—David could hear his booted feet thudding down the stairs, shaking the whole building.

The boy stood where he was for a moment, knowing what he had to do now—absolutely had to do-but reluc-tant to do it in front of his parents. Still, there was no choice, was there. And he had been right about the cop. The big man hadn’t exactly been reading his mind like it was a newspaper, but he’d been getting some of it—he’d been getting the God stuff. But maybe that was good. Better the cop should see God than the shotgun shell, maybe.

He turned and took two slow steps to the foot of the bunk. He could feel the weight of the shell in his pocket as he went. That weight was very clear, very distinct. It was as if he had a lump of gold hidden in there.

No, more dangerous than gold. A chunk of something radioactive, maybe.

He stood where he was for a moment, back to the room, and then, very slowly, sank down on his knees. He took a deep breath, pulling in air until his lungs would absolutely hold no more, then let it out again in a long silent whoosh. He folded his hands on the rough woolen blanket, dropped his forehead softly onto them.

“David, what’s wrong with you.” his mother called.

“David!”

“There isn’t anything wrong with him,” his father said, and David smiled a little as he closed his eyes.

“What do you mean, nothing wrong.” Eilie screamed. “Look at him, he fell down, he’s fainting! David!”

Their voices were distant now, fading, but before they went out entirely, he heard his dad say, “Not fainting. Praying.”

No God in Desperation. Well, let’s just see about that.

Then he was gone, no longer concerned about what his parents might be thinking, no longer worried that old Mr. White Hair might have seen him filch the shotgun shell and might tell the monster cop what he had seen, no longer grieving for sweet little Pie, who had never hurt anyone in her life and hadn’t deserved to die as she had He was not, in fact, precisely even inside his own head anymore. He was in the black now, blind but not deaf in the black and listening for his God.

Like most spirituaL conversions, David Carver s was dramatic only on the outside; on the inside it was quiet, almost mundane. Not rational, perhaps—matters of the spirit may never be strictly rational—but possessed of its own clarity and logic. And to David, at least, its genu ineness was beyond question. He had found God, that was all. And (this he considered probably more important) God had found him.