The man who had once been on the cover of People and Time and Premiere (when he married the actress with all the emeralds), and the front page of The New York Times (when he won the National Book Award for his novel Delight), and in the center-spread of inside View (when he was arrested for beating up his third wife, the one before the actress with the emeralds), had to take apiss.

He pulled his motorcycle over to the westbound edge of Highway 50, working methodically down through the gears with a stiff left foot, and finally rolling to a stop on the edge of the tar. Good thing there was so little traffic out here, because you couldn't park your scoot off the road in the Great Basin even if you had once fucked America's most famous actress (although she had admit-tedly been a little long in the tooth by then) and been spoken of in connection with the Nobel Prize for Litera-ture. If you tried it, your bike was apt to first heel over on her kickstand and then fall flat on her roadbars. The shoulder looked hard, but that was mostly attitude - not much different from the attitudes of certain people he could name, including the one he needed a mirror to get a good look at. And try picking up a seven-hundred-pound Harley-Davidson once you'd dumped it, especially when you were fifty-six and out of shape. Just try.

Idon't think so, he thought, looking at the red-and-cream Harley Softail, a street bike at which any purist would have turned up his nose, listening to the engine tick-tock in the silence. The only other sounds were the hot wind and the minute sound of sand spacking against his leather jacket - twelve hundred dollars at Barneys in New York. A jacket meant to be photographed by a fag from Interview magazine if ever there had been one. I think we'll skip that part entirely', shall we?

"Fine by me," he said. He took off his helmet and put it on the Harley's seat. Then he rubbed a slow hand down his face, which was as hot as the wind and at least twice as sunburned. He thought he had never felt quite so tired or so out of his element in his whole life.

2

The Literary Lion walked stiffly into the desert, his long gray hair brushing against the shoulders of his motorcycle jacket, the scrubby mesquite and paintbrush ticking against his leather chaps (also from Barneys). He looked around carefully hut saw nothing coming in either direction. There was something parked off the road a mile or two farther west - a truck or maybe a motor home - but even if there were people in it, he doubted that they could watch the great man take a leak without binoculars. And if they were watching, so what? lt was a trick most people knew, after all.

He unzipped his fly - John Edward Marinville, the man Harper's had once called "the writer Norman Mailer always wanted to be," the man Shelby Foote had once cailed "the only living American writer of John Stein-beck's stature" - and hauled out his original fountain pen. He had to piss like a racehorse but for almost a minute nothing happened; he just stood there with his dry dick in his hand.

Then, at last, urine arced out and turned the tough and dusty leaves of the mesquite a darker, shiny green.

"Praise Jesus, thank you, Lord!" he bellowed in his rolling, trembling Jimmy Swaggart voice, it was a great success at cocktail parties; Tom Wolfe had once laughed so hard when he was doing the evangelist voice that Johnny thought the man was going to have a stroke. 'Water in the desert, that's a big ten-four! Hello Julia!"

He sometimes thought it was this version of "hallelujah," not his insatiable appetite for booze, drugs, and younger women, that had caused the famous actress to push him into the pool during a drunken press conference at the Bel-Air hotel. . . and then to take her emeralds elsewhere.

That incident hadn't marked the beginning of his 2 decline, but it had marked the point where the decline had become impossible to ignore - he wasn't just having a bad day or a bad year anymore, he was sort of having a bad lije. The picture of him climbing out of the pool in his sopping white suit, a big drunk's grin on his face, had appeared in Esquire's Dubious Achievements issue, and after that had commenced his more-or-less regular ap-pearances in Spy magazine. Spy was the place, he'd come to believe, where once-legitimate reputations went to die.

At least this afternoon, as he stood facing north and pissing with his shadow stretched out long to his right, these thoughts didn't hurt as much as they sometimes did. As they always did in New York, where everything hurt these days. The desert had a way of making Shake-speare's "bubble reputation" seem not only fragile but irrelevant. When you had become a kind of literary Elvis Presley - aging, overweight, and still at the party long after you should have gone home - that wasn't such a bad thing.

He spread his legs even wider, bent slightly at the waist, and let go of his penis so he could massage his lower back. He had been told that doing this helped sus tam the flow a little longer, and he had an idea that it did but he knew he would still have to take a leak again long before he got to Austin, which was the next little Nevada shitsplat on the long road to California. His prostate clearly wasn't what it used to be. When he thought about it these days (which was often), he pictured a bloated creneliated thing that looked like a radiation-baked giant brain in a fifties drive-in horror movie. He should have at checked, he knew that, and not as an isolated event but as part of a complete soup-to-nuts physical. Of course he should, but hey, it wasn't as if he were pissing blood or anything, and besides -

Well, all right. He was scared, that was the besides There was a lot more to what was wrong with him than just the way his literary reputation had gone slipping through his fingers during the last five years, and quitting the pills and booze hadn't improved things as he'd hoped. In some ways, quitting had made things worse. The trouble with sobriety, Johnny had found, was that you remembered all the things you had to be scared of. He was afraid that a doctor might find more than a prostate roughly the size of The Brain from Planet Arous when he stuck his finger up into the literary lion's nether regions; he was afraid that the doctor might find a prostate that was as black as a decayed pumpkin and as cancerous as Frank Zappa's had been. And even if cancer wasn't lurking there, it might be lurking somewhere else.

The lung, why not? He'd smoked two packs of Camels every day for twenty years, then three packs of Camel Lights for another ten, as if smoking Camel Lights was going to fix everything somehow, spruce up his bronchial tubes, polish his trachea, refurbish his poor sludgecaked alveoli. Well, bullshit. He'd been off the cigarettes for ten years now, the light as well as the heavy, but he still wheezed like an old carthorse until at least noon, and sometimes woke himself up coughing in the middle of the night.

Or the stomach! Yeah, why not there? Soft, pink, trusting, the perfect place for disaster to strike. He had been raised in a family of ravenous meat-eaters where medium-rare meant the cook had breathed hard on the steak and the concept of well-done was unknown; he loved hot sauces and hot peppers; he did not believe in fruits and salads unless one was badly constipated; he'd eaten like that his whole fucking life, still ate like that, and would probably go on eating like that until they slammed him into a hospital bed and started feeding him all the right things through a plastic tube.

The brain? Possible. Quite possible. A tumor, or maybe (here was an especially cheerful thought) an unseasonably early case of Alzheimer's.

The pancreas? Well, that one was fast, at least. Express service, no waiting.

Heart attack'? Cirrhosis? Stroke?

How likely they all sounded! How logical!

In many interviews he had identified himself as a man outraged by death, but that was pretty much the same old big-balls crap he'd been selling throughout his career. He was terrified of death, that was the truth, and as a result of spending his life honing his imagination, he could see it coming from at least four dozen different directions and late at night when he couldn't sleep, he was apt to see it coming from four dozen different directions at once. Refusing to see the doctor, to have a checkup and let them peek under the hood, would not cause any of those dis-eases to pause in their approach or their feeding upon him - if, indeed, the feeding had already begun - but if he stayed away from the doctors and their devilish machines he wouldn't have to know. You didn't have to deal with the monster under the bed or lurking in the corner if ~OU 7 never actually turned on the bedroom lights, that was the thing. And what no doctor in the world seemed to know was that, for men like Johnny Marinville, fearing was sometimes better than finding. Especially when you'd put out the welcome mat for every disease going.

Including AIDS, he thought, continuing to stare out at the desert. He had tried to be careful - and he didn't get laid as much as he used to, anyway, that was the painful truth - and he knew that for the last eight or ten months he had been careful, because the blackouts had stopped with the drinking. But in the year before he'd quit, there had been four or five occasions when he had simply awakened next to some anonymous jane. On each of these occasions he had gotten up and gone immediately into the bathroom to check the toilet. Once there had been a used condom floating in there, so that was probably okay. On the other occasions, zilch. Of course he or his friend (his gal-pal, in 7 tabloid-ese) might have flushed it down in the night, but you couldn't know for sure, could you? Not when you'd progressed to the blackout stage. And AIDS - "That shit gets in there and waits," he said, then winced as a particularly vicious gust of wind drove a fine sheet of alkali dust against his cheek, his neck, and his hanging 2 organ. This latter had quit doing anything useful at least a full minute ago.

Johnny shook it briskly, then slipped it back into his underpants. "Brethern," he told the distant, shimmering mountains in his earnest revival preacher's voice, "we are told in the Book of Ephesians, chapter three, verse nine, that it matters not how much you jump and dance; the last two drops go in your pants. So it is written and so it is - "

He was turning around, zipping his fly, talking mostly to keep the megrims away (they had been gathering like vultures just lately, those megrims), and now he stopped doing everything at once.

There was a police-cruiser parked behind his motor-cycle, its blue flashers turning lazily in the hot desert daylight.

3

It was his first wife who provided Johnny Marinville with what might be his last chance.

Oh, not his last chance to publish his work; shit, no. He would be able to go on doing that as long as he remained capable of (a) putting words on paper and (b) sending them off to his agent. Once you'd been accepted as a bona fide literary lion, someone would be glad to go on pub-lishing your words even after they had degenerated into self-parody or outright drivel. Johnny sometimes thought that the most terrible thing about the American literary establishment was how they let you swing in the wind, slowly strangling, while they all stood around at their asshole cocktail parties, congratulating themselves on how kind they were being to poor old what' s-his-name.

No, what Terry gave him wasn't his last chance to publish, but maybe his last to write something really worthwhile, something that would get him noticed again in a positive way. Something that might also sell like crazy. . . and he could use the money, there was no doubt about that.

Best of all, he didn't think Terry had the slightest idea of what she had said, which meant he wouldn't have to share any of the proceeds with her, if proceeds there were. He wouldn't even have to mention her on the Acknowl-edgements page. if he didn't want to, but he supposed he probably would. Sobering up had been a terrifying experience in many ways, but it did help a person remember his responsibilities.

He had married Terry when he was twenty-five and she was twenty-one, a junior at Vassar. She had never fin-ished college. They had been married for almost twenty years and during that time she had borne him three children, all grown now. One of them, Bronwyn, still talked to him. The other two . . . well, if they ever got tired of cutting off their noses to spite their faces, he would be around. He was not by nature a vindictive man.

Terry seemed to know that. After five years during which their only communication had been through lawyers, they had begun a cautious dialogue. sometimes by letter, more often by telephone. These communications had been tentative at first, both of them afraid of mines still buried in the ruined city of their affections, but over the years they had become more regular. Terry regarded her famous ex with a kind of stoic, amused interest that he found distressing, somehow - it was not, in his opinion, the sort of attitude an ex-wife was supposed to have for a man who had gone on to become one of the most dis cussed writers of his generation. But she also spoke to him with a straightforward kindness that he found sooth ing, like a cool hand on a hot brow.

They had been in contact more since he'd quit drinking (but still always by phone or by letter; both of them seemed to know, even without discussing it, that meeting face to face would put too much pressure on the fragile bond they had forged), but in some ways these sober con-versations had been even more dangerous. . . not acrimo-nious, but always with that possibility. She wanted him to go back to Alcoholics Anonymous, told him bluntly that if he didn't, he'd eventually start drinking again. And the 2 drugs would follow, she said, as surely as dark comes after twilight.

Johnny told her he had no intention of spending the rest of his life sitting in church basements with a bunch of 2 drunks, all of them talking about how wonderful it was to have a power greater than one's self . . . before getting back into their old cars and driving home to their mostly spouseless houses to feed their cats. "People in AA are generally too fundamentally broken to see that they've turned their lives over to an empty concept and a failed ideal," he said. "Take it from me, I've been there. Or take it from John Cheever, if you like. He wrote particularly well about that."

"John Cheever isn't writing much these days," Terry replied. "I think you know why, too."

Terry could be irritating, no doubt about that.

It was three months ago that she had given him the great idea, tossing it off in a casual conversation that had rambled through what the kids were up to, what she was up to, and, of course, what he was up to. What he had been up to in the early part of this year was agonizing over the first two hundred pages of a historical novel about Jay Gould. He had finally seen it for what it was - warmed-over Gore Vidal - and trashed it. Baked it, actually. In a fit of pique he had resolved to keep entirely to himself, he had tossed his computer-storage discs for the novel into the microwave and given them ten minutes on high. The stench had been unbelievable, a thing that had come roaring out of the kitchen with quills on it, and he'd actually had to replace the microwave.

Then he'd found himself telling Terry the whole thing. When he finished, he sat in his office chair with the phone pressed to his ear and his eyes closed, waiting for her to tell him not to bother with resuming the AA meetings, that what he needed was a good shrink, and in a hurry.

Instead she said he should have put the discs in a casse-role dish and used the convection oven. He knew she was joking - and that she thought at least part of the joke was on him - but her acceptance of the way he was and how he behaved still felt like a cool hand on a fevered brow. It wasn't approval he got from her, but approval wasn't what he wanted.

"Of course you never were much good in the kitchen," she said, and her matter-of-fact tone made him laugh out loud. "So what are you going to do now, Johnny? Any idea?"

"Not the slightest."

"You ought to write some nonfiction. Get away from the whole idea of the novel for awhile."

'That's dumb, Terry. I can't write nonfiction, and you know it."

"I know nothing of the kind," she'd said, speaking in a sharp don't-be-a-fool tone he got from no one else these days, least of all from his agent. The more Johnny flopped and flailed around, the more gruesomely obsequious Bill Harris became, it seemed. "During the first two years we were married, you must have written at least a dozen essays. Published them, too. For good money. Life, Harp-er's, even a couple in The New Yorker. Easy for you to 2 forget; you weren't the one who did the shopping and paid the bills. 1 loved the puppies."

"Oh. The so-called American Heart Essays. Right. I didn't forget em, Terry, 1 blocked em out. Rent-payers after the last of the Guggenheim dough was gone; that's basically what they were. They've never even been collected."

"You wouldn't allow them to be collected," she re-torted. "They didn't fit your golden idea of immortality."

Johnny greeted this with silence. Sometimes he hated her memory. She'd never been able to write worth a shit herself, the stuff she'd been turning in to her Honors writing seminar the year he met her had been just hor-rible, and since then she'd never published anything more complex than a letter to the editor, but she was a champ at data-storage. He had to give her that.

"You there, Johnny?"

"I'm here."

"I always know when I'm telling you stuff you don't like," she said brightly, "because it's the only time you ever shut up. You get all broody."

"Well, I'm here," he repeated heavily, and fell silent again, hoping she would change the subject. She didn't, of course.

"You did three or four of those essays because someone a~cked for them, I don't remember who - "

A miracle, he had thought. She doesn't remember who.

" - and I'm sure you would have stopped there, except by then you were getting queries from other editors. It didn't surprise me a bit. Those essays were good."

He was silent this time, not to indicate disinterest or disapproval but because he was thinking back, trying to remember if they had been any good. Terry couldn't be trusted a hundred per cent when it came to such questions, but you couldn't throw her conclusions out of court without a hearing, either. As a fiction-writer she'd been of the "I saw a bird at sunrise and my heart leaped up" school, but as a critic she had been tough as nails and capable of insights which were spooky, almost like telepathy. One of the things that had attracted him to her (although he supposed the fact that she had the best breasts in America back in those days had helped matters along) was the dichotomy between what she wanted to do - write fiction - and what she was able to do, which was to write criticism that could cut like a diamond chip.

As for the so-called American Heart Essays, the only one he could remember clearly after all these years was Death on the Second Shift." It had been about a father and son working together in a Pittsburgh steel-mill. The father had had a heart-attack and died in his son's arms on the third day of Johnny Marinville's four-day research junket. He had meant to focus on an entirely dif-ferent aspect of millwork, but had changed course at once, and without a second thought. The result had been a wretchedly sentimental piece - the fact that every word was true hadn't changed that in the slightest - but it had also been a tremendously popular piece. The man who'd edited it for Life dropped him a note six weeks later and said it had generated the fourth4argest volume of letters in the magazine's history.

Other stuff started to come back to him - titles, mostly, things like "Feeding the Flames" and "A Kiss on Lake Saranac." Terrible titles, but . . . fourth-largest volume of letters.

Hmm mm.

Where might those old essays be? in the Marinville Collection at Fordham? Possible. Hell, they might even be in the attic of the cottage in Connecticut. He wouldn't mind a look at them. Maybe they could be updated. . . or . . .

Something began to nibble at the back of his mind.

"Do you still have your scoot, Johnny?"

"Huh?" He barely heard her.

"Your scoot. Your ride. Your motorcycle."

"Sure," he said. "It's stored at that garage out in West-port we used to use. You know the one."

"Gibby's?"

"Yeah, Gibby's. Someone different owns it now, but it used to be Gibby's Garage, yeah." He had been blindsided by a brilliantly textured memory: he and Terry, fully clothed and petting like mad behind Gibby's Garage one afternoon in. . . well, a long time ago, leave it at that, Terry had been wearing a pair of tight blue shorts. He doubted if her mother would have approved of them, God, no, but he himself had thought those discount-store specials made her look like the Queen of the Western World. Her ass was only good, but her legs . . . man, those legs had gone not just up to her chin but all the way out to Arcturus and beyond. How had they gotten out there in the first place, among the cast-off tires and rusty engine parts standing hip-deep in sunflowers and feeling each other up? He couldn't remember, but he remembered the rich curve of her breast in his hand, and how she'd gripped the belt-loops of his jeans when he cried out against her neck, hauling him closer so he could come tight and hard against her taut belly.

He dropped a hand into his lap and wasn't exactly surprised at what he found there. Say, folks, Frampton comes alive.

". . .new bunch, or maybe even a book."

He settled his hand firmly back on the arm of his chair "Huh? What?"

"Are you going deaf as well as senile?"

"No. I was remembering one time with you behind Gibby's. Making out."

"Oh. In the sunflowers, right?"

"Right."

There was a long pause when she might have been considering some further comment on that interlude. Johnny was almost hoping for one. Instead, she went back to her previous scripture.

"1 said maybe you ought to drive across country on your bike before you get too old to work the footgears, or start drinking again and splash yourself all over the Black Hills."

"Are you out of your mind? I haven't been on that thing in three years, and I have no intention of getting back on, Terry. My eyesight sucks - "

"So get a stronger pair of glasses - "

" - and my reflexes are shot. John Cheever may or may not have died of alcoholism, but John Gardner definitely went out on a motorcycle. Had an argument with a tree.

He lost. It happened on a road in Pennsylvania. One I've driven myself."

Terry wasn't listening. She was one of the few people in the world who felt perfectly comfortable ignoring him and letting her own thoughts carry her away. He supposed that was another reason he'd divorced her. He didn't like being ignored, especially by a woman.

"You could cross the country on your motorcycle and collect material for a new bunch of essays," she was saying. She sounded both excited and amused. "If you front-loaded the best of the early bunch - as Part One, you know - you'd have a pretty good-sized book. American Heart, 1966 - 1996, essays by John Edward Marinville." She giggled. "Who knows? You might even get another good notice from Shelby Foote. That's the one you always liked the best, wasn't it?" She paused for his reply, and when it didn't come, she asked him if he was there, first lightly, then with a little concern.

"Yes," he said. "I'm here." He was suddenly glad he was sitting down. "Listen, Terry, I have to go. I've got an appointment."

"New lady-friend?"

"Podiatrist," he said, thinking Foote, thinking foot. That name was like the final number in a bank-vault com-bination. Click, and the door swings open.

"Well, take care of yourself," she said. "And honest to God, Johnny, think about getting back to AA. I mean, what can it hurt?"

"Nothing, I suppose," he said, thinking about Shelby Foote, who had once called John Edward Marinville the only living American writer of John Steinbeck's stature, and Terry was right - of all the praisenuggets he'd ever gotten, that was the one he liked the best.

"Right, nothing." She paused. "Johnny, are you all right? Cause you sound like you're hardly there."

"Fine. Say hello to the kids for me."

"I always do. They usually respond with what my ma used to call potty-words, but I always do. Bye."

He hung up without looking at the telephone, and when it fell off the edge of the desk and onto the floor, he still didn't look around. John Steinbeck had crossed the country with his dog in a makeshift camper. Johnny had a barely used 1340-cc Harley-Davidson Softail stored out in Connecticut. Not American Heart. She was wrong about that, and not just because it was the name of a Jeff Bridges movie from a few years back. Not American Heart but - "Travels with Harley," he murmured.

It was a ridiculous title, a laughable title, like a Mad 2 magazine parody . . . but was it any worse than an essay titled "Death on the Second Shift" or "Feeding the Flames"? He thought not . . . and he felt the title would work, would rise above its punny origins. He had always trusted his intuitions, and he hadn't had one as strong as this in years. He could cross the country on his red-and-cream Softail, from the Atlantic where it touched Con-necticut to the Pacific where it touched California. A book of essays that might cause the critics to entirely rethink their image of him, a book of essays that might even get him back on the bestseller lists, if. . . if. . .

"If it was bighearted," he said. His heart was thumping hard in his chest, but for once the feel of that didn't scare him. "Bighearted like Blue Highways. Bighearted like. well, like Steinbeck."

Sitting there in his office chair with the telephone bur ring harshly at his feet, what Johnny Marinville had seen was nothing less than redemption. A way out.

He had scooped the telephone up and called his agent his fingers flying over the buttons.

"Bill," he said, "it's Johnny. I was just sitting here, thinking about some essays I wrote when I was a kid, and I had a fantastic idea. It's going to sound crazy at first, but hear me out. . ."

4

As Johnny made his way up the sandy slope to the highway, trying not to pant too much, he saw that the guy standing behind his Harley and writing down the plate number was the biggest damned chunk of cop he had ever seen - six-six at least, and at least two hundred and sev-enty pounds on the hoof.

"Afternoon, Officer," Johnny said. He looked down at himself and saw a tiny dark spot on the crotch of his Levi's. No matter how much you jump and dance, he thought.

"Sir, are you aware that parking a vehicle on a state road is against the law?" the cop asked without look-ing up.

"No, but I hardly think - "

- it can be much of a problem on a road as deserted as U.s. 50 was how he meant to finish, and in the haughty "How dare you question my judgement?" tone that he had been using on underlings and service people for years, but then he saw something that changed his mind. There was blood on the right cuff and sleeve of the cop's shirt, quite a lot of it, drying now to a maroon glaze. He had probably finished moving some large piece of roadkill off the highway not very long ago - likely a deer or an elk hit by a speeding semi. That would explain both the blood and the bad temper. The shirt looked like a dead loss; that much blood would never come out.

"Sir?" the cop asked sharply. He had finished writ-ing down the plate number now but went on looking at the bike, his blond eyebrows drawn together, his mouth scrimped flat. It was as if he didn't want to look at the bike's owner, as if he knew that would only make him feel lousier than he did already. "You were saying?"

"Nothing, Officer," Johnny said. He spoke in a neutral tone, not humble but not haughty, either. He didn't want to cross this big lug when he was clearly having a bad day.

Still without looking up, his notepad strangled in one hand and his gaze fixed severely on the Harley's taillight, the cop said: "It's also against the law to relieve yourself within sight of a state road. Did you know that?"

"No, I'm sorry," Johnny said. He felt a wild urge to laugh bubbling around in his chest and suppressed it.

"Well, it is. Now, I'm going to let you go He looked up for the first time, looked at Johnny, and his eyes widened. . . ... go with a warning this time, but..

He trailed off, eyes now as wide as a kid's when the circus parade comes thumping down the street in a swirl of clowns and trombones. Johnny knew the look, although he had never expected to see it out here in the Nevada desert, and on the face of a gigantic Scandahoovian cop who looked as if his reading tastes might run the gamut from Playboy's Party Jokes to Guns and Ammo magazine.

A fan, he thought. I'm out here in the big nowhere between Ely and Austin, and I've found a by-God fan.

He couldn't wait to tell Steve Ames about this when 2 they met up in Austin tonight. Hell, he might call him on the cellular later on this afternoon . . . if the cellulars worked out here, that was. Now that he thought about it, he supposed they didn't. The battery in his was up, he'd had it on the charger all last night, but he hadn't actually talked to Steve on the damned thing since leaving Salt Lake City. In truth he wasn't all that crazy about the cel-lulars. He didn't think they actually did cause cancer, that was probably just more tabloid scare-stuff, but. . .

"Holy shit," the cop muttered. His right hand, the one below the bloodstained cuff and sleeve, went up to his right cheek. For one bizarre moment he looked to Johnny like a pro football lineman doing a Jack Benny riff. "Ho lee shit."

"What's the trouble, Officer?" Johnny asked. He was, with some difficulty, suppressing a smile. One thing hadn't changed over the years: he loved to be recognized God, how he loved it.

"You're . . . JohnEdwardMarinville!" the cop gasped, running it all together, as if he really had only one name, like Pel�� or Cantinflas. The cop was now starting to grin himself, and Johnny thought, Oh Mr. Policeman, what big teeth you have. "I mean, you are, aren't you? You wrote Delight! And, oh shit, Song of the Hammer! I'm standing right next to the guy who wrote Song of the Hammer!" And then he did something which Johnny found genu-inely endearing: reached out and touched the sleeve of his motorcycle jacket, as if to prove that the man wearing it was actually real. "Ho-lee shit!"

"Well, yes, I'm Johnny Marinville," he said, speaking in the modest tones he reserved for these occasions (and these occasions only, as a rule). "Although I have to tell you that I've never been recognized by someone who's just watched me take a leak by the side of the road."

"Oh, forget that," the cop said, and seized Johnny s hand. For just a moment before the cop's fingers closed over his, Johnny saw that the man's hand was also smeared with half-dried blood; both lifeline and loveline stood out a dark, liverish red. Johnny tried to keep his smile in place as they shook, and thought he did pretty well, but he was aware that the corners of his mouth seemed to have gained weight. It's getting on me, he thought. 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 drivers-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 anything 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. Marinville, 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, ululating 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 tr��s 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 uniform 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?" the 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 listening 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 tr��s 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't 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.

He had been an intuitive man all his life; it was intui-tion, not planning, that had been responsible for his best work as a writer. The drinking and the drugs had dulled those intuitions but not destroyed them, and they had come back - not all the way, at least not yet, but some - since he'd gotten straight. Now, looking at the poncho dangling out of the unbuckled saddlebag, Johnny felt alarm bells start going off in his head.

The cop did it.

That was completely senseless, but intuition told him it was true just the same. The cop had unbuckled the saddlebag and pulled his orange poncho partway out of it while Johnny had been north of the road with his back turned, taking a piss. And for most of their conversation, the cop had deliberately stood so Johnny couldn't see the hanging poncho. The guy wasn't as starry-eyed about meeting his favorite author as he had seemed. Maybe not starry-eyed at all. And he had an agenda here.

What agenda? Would you mind telling me that? What agenda?

Johnny didn't know, but he didn't like it. He didn't like that weird Yoda shit with the coyote much, either.

"Well?" the cop asked. He was smiling, and here was another thing not to like. It wasn't a goony I'm-just-a-fan-in-love smile anymore, if it ever had been; there was something cold about it. Maybe contemptuous.

"Well, what?"

"Are you going to take care of it or not? Tak!"

His heart jumped. "Tak, what does that mean?"

"I didn't say tak, you did. You said tak."

The cop crossed his arms and stood smiling at him.

1want out of here, Johnny thought.

Yes, that was pretty much the bottom line, wasn't it? And if that meant following orders, so be it. This little interlude, which had started off being funny in a nice way, had suddenly gotten funny in a way that wasn't so nice as if a cloud had gone over the sun and a previously pleasant day had darkened, grown sinister.

Suppose he means to hurt me? He's pretty clearly a beer or two short of a sixpack.

Well, he answered himself, suppose he does? What are you going to do about it? Complain to the local kiyotes.

His overtrained imagination served up an extremely ugly image: the cop digging a hole in the desert, while in the shade of his cruiser lay the body of a man who had once won the National Book Award and fucked America's most famous actress. He negated the image while it was little more than a sketch, not so much out of fear as by virtue of an odd protective arrogance. Men like him weren't murdered, after all. They sometimes took their own lives, but they weren't murdered, especially by i~2 psychotic fans. That was pulp-fiction bullshit.

There was John Lennon, of course, but - He moved to his saddlebag, catching a whiff of the cop as he went by. For one moment Johnny had a brilliant but unfocused memory of his drunken, abusive, crazily funny father, who had always seemed to smell exactly as this cop did now: Old Spice on top, sweat underneath the aftershave, plain old black-eyed meanness under every thing, like the dirt floor in an old cellar.

Both of the saddlebag's buckles were undone. Johnny raised the fringed top, aware that he could still smell sweat and Old Spice. The cop was standing right at his shoulder. Johnny reached for the hanging arm of the poncho, then stopped as he saw what was lying on top of his pile of Triple-A maps. Part of him was shocked, but most of him wasn't even surprised. He looked at the cop. The cop was looking into the saddlebag.

"Oh, Johnny," he said regretfully. "This is disap-pointing. This is tr��s disappointing."

He reached in and picked up the gallon-sized Baggie lying on the pile of maps. Johnny didn't have to sniff to know that the stuff inside wasn't Cherry Blend. Stuck on the front of the Baggie, like someone's idea of a joke, was a round yellow smile sticker.

"That's not mine," Johnny Marinville said. His voice sounded tired and distant, like the message on a very old phone answering machine. "That's not mine and you know it's not, don't you? Because you put it there."

"Oh yeah, blame the cops," the big man said, "just like in your pinko-liberal books, right? Man, I smelled the dope the second you got close to me. You reek of it! Tak!"

"Look - " Johnny began.

"Get in the car, pinko! Get in the car, fag!" The voice indignant, the gray eyes full of laughter.

It's a joke, Johnny thought. Some kind of crazy prac-tical joke.

Then, from somewhere off to the southwest, more howls rose - a tangle of them, this time - and when the cop's eyes rolled in that direction and he grinned, Johnny felt a scream rising in his throat and had to press his lips together to keep it in. There was no joke in the big cop's expression as he looked toward that sound; it was the look of a man who is totally insane. And Jesus, he was so fucking big.

"My children of the desert!" the cop said. "The can toi! What music they make!"

He laughed, looked down at the Baggie of dope in his big hand, shook his head, and laughed even harder. Johnny stood watching him, his assurance that men like him were never murdered suddenly gone.

"Travels with Harley," the cop said. "Do you know what a stupid name for a book that is? What a stupid con-cept it is? And to plunder the literary legacy of John Steinbeck . . . a writer whose shoes you aren't fit to lick . . . that makes me mad."

And before Johnny knew what was happening, a huge silver flare of pain went off in his head. He was aware of staggering backward with his hands clapped over his face and hot blood gushing through his fingers, of flailing his arms, of thinking I'm all right, I'm not going to fall over, I'm all right, and then he was lying on his side in the road, screaming up at the blue socket of the sky. The nose under his fingers no longer felt on straight; it seemed to be lying against his left cheek. He had a deviated septum from all the coke he had done in the eighties, and he remembered his doctor telling him he ought to get that fixed before he ran into a sign or a swinging door or something and it just exploded. Well, it hadn't been a door or a sign, and it hadn't exactly exploded, but it had certainly undergone a swift and radical change. He thought these things in what seemed to be perfectly co-herent fashion even while his mouth went on screaming.

"In fact, it makes me furious," the cop said, and kicked him high up on the left thigh. The pain came in a sheet that sank in like acid and turned the big muscles in his leg to stone. Johnny rolled back and forth, now clutching his leg instead of his nose, scraping his cheek against the asphalt of Highway 50, screaming, gasping, pulling sand down his throat and coughing it harshly back out when he tried to scream again.

"The truth is it makes me sick with rage," the cop said, and kicked Johnny's ass, high up toward the small of his back. Now the pain was too enormous to be borne; surely he would pass out. But he didn't. He only writhed and crawdaddied on the broken white line, screaming and bleeding from his broken nose and coughing out sand while in the distance coyotes howled at the thickening shadows stretching out from the distant mountains.

"Get up," the cop said. "On your feet, Lord Jim."

"I can't," Johnny Marinville sobbed, pulling his legs up to his chest and crossing his arms over his belly, this defensive posture dimly remembered from the '68 Democratic convention in Chicago, and from even before that from a lecture he had attended in Philadelphia, prior to the first Freedom Rides down into Mississippi. He had meant to go along on one of those - not only was it a great cause, it was the stuff of which great fiction was made - but in the end, something else had come up. Probably his cock, at the sight of a raised skirt.

"On your feet, you piece of shit. You're in my house now, the house of the wolf and the scorpion, and you better not forget it."

"I can't, you broke my leg, Jesus Christ you hurt me so bad - "

"Your leg's not broken and you don't know what being hurt is yet. Now get up."

"I can't. I really - "

The gunshot was deafening, the ricochet of the slug off the road a monstrous wasp-whine, and Johnny was on his feet even before he was a hundred per cent sure he wasn dead. He stood with one foot in the eastbound lane and one in the westbound, drunk-swaying back and forth. The lower half of his face was covered with blood. Sand had stuck in it, making little curls and commas on his lips and cheeks and chin.

"Hey bigshot, you wet your pants," the cop said.

Johnny looked down and saw he had. No matter how much you jump and dance, he thought. His left thigh throbbed like an infected tooth. His ass was still mostly numb - it felt like a frozen slab of meat. He supposed he should be grateful, all things considered. If the cop had kicked him a little higher that second time, he might have paralyzed him.

"You're a sorry excuse for a writer, and you're a sorry excuse for a man," the cop said. He was holding a huge revolver in one hand. He looked down at the Baggie of pot, which he still held in the other, and shook his head disgustedly. "I know that not just by what you say, but by the mouth you say it out of. In fact, if I looked at your loose-lipped and self-indulgent mouth for too long at a stretch, I'd kill you right here. I wouldn't be able to help myself."

Coyotes howled in the distance, wh-wh-whoooo, like something that belonged in the soundtrack of an old John Wayne movie.

"You did enough," Johnny said in a foggy, stuffy voice. "Not yet," the cop said, and smiled. "But the nose is a start. It actually improves your looks. Not much, but a little." He opened the back door of his cruiser. As he did, Johnny wondered how long this little comedy had taken. He had absolutely no idea, but not one car or truck had passed while it was going on. Not one. "Get in, bigshot."

"Where are you taking me?"

"Where do you think I'd take a self-indulgent pinko-pothead asshole like you? To the old calabozo. Now get in the car."

Johnny got in the car. As he did, he touched the right breast pocket of his motorcycle jacket.

The cellular phone was in there.

5

He couldn't sit on his bottom, it hurt too much, so he leaned over on his right thigh, one hand cupped loosely over his throbbing nose. It felt like something alive and malevolent, something that was sinking deep, poisonous stingers into his flesh, but for the time being he was able to ignore it. Let the cellular work, he prayed, speaking to a God he had made fun of for most of his creative life, most recently in a story called "Heaven-Sent Weather," which had been published in Harper's magazine to gener-ally favorable comment. Please let the damned phone work, God, and please let Steve have his ears on. Then, realizing all of that was getting the cart quite a bit ahead of the horse, he added a third request: Please give me a chance to use the phone in the first place, okay?

As if in answer to this part of his prayer, the big cop passed the driver's door of his cruiser without even looking at it and walked to Johnny's motorcycle. He put Johnny's helmet on his own head, then swung one leg over the seat - he was very tall, so it was actually more of a step than a swing - and a moment later the Harley's engine exploded into life. The cop stood astride the seat, unbuckled helmet straps hanging, seeming to dwarf the Harley with his own less lovely bulk. He twisted the throttle four or five times, gunning the motor as if he liked the sound. Then he rocked the Harley upright, kicked back the center-stand, and toed the gearshift down into first. Moving cautiously to start with, reminding Johnny a little of himself when he had taken the bike out of storage and ridden it in traffic for the first time in three years, the cop descended the side of the road. He used the hand-brake and paddled along with his feet, watching intently for hazards and obstacles. Once he was on the desert floor he accelerated, changing rapidly up through the gears and weaving around clumps of sagebrush.

Run into a gopher-hole, you sadistic fuck, Johnny thought, sniffing gingerly through his plugged and throb-bing nose. Hit something hard. Crash and burn.

"Don't waste your time on him," he mumbled, and used his thumb to pop the snap over the right breast pocket of his motorcycle jacket. He took out the Motorola cel-lular phone (the cellulars had been Bill Harris's idea, maybe the only good idea his agent had had in the last four years) and flipped it open. He stared down at the dis-play, breath held, now praying for an S and two bars. Come on, God, please, he thought, sweat trickling down his cheeks, blood still leaking out of his swollen, leaning nose. Got to be an S and two bars, anything less and I might as well use this thing for a suppository.

The phone beeped. What came up in the window on the left side of the display was an 5, which stood for "ser-vice," and one bar.

Just one.

"No, please," he moaned. "Please, don't do this to me, just one more, one more please!"

He shook the phone in frustration . . . and saw he had neglected to pull up the antenna. He did, and a second bar appeared above the first. It flickered, went out, then reap-peared, still flickery but there.

"Yes !" Johnny whispered. "Yesss!" He jerked his head up and stared out the window. His sweat-circled eyes peered through a tangle of long gray hair - there was blood in it now - like the eyes of some hunted animal peering out of its hole. The cop had brought the Softail to a stop about three hundred yards out in the scree. He stepped off and then stepped away, letting the bike fall over. The engine died. Even in this situation, Johnny felt a twinge of outrage. The Harley had brought him all the way across the country without a single missed stroke of its sweet American engine, and it hurt to see it treated with such absent disdain.

"You crazy shit," he whispered. He snuffled back half-congealed blood, spat a jellied wad of it onto the cruiser's paper-littered floor, and looked down at the telephone again. On the row of buttons at the bottom, second from the right, was one which read NAME/MENU. Steve had pro-grammed this function for him just before they had set out. Johnny punched the button, and his agent's first name appeared in the window: BILL. Pushed it again and TERRY appeared. Pushed it again and JACK appeared - Jack

Appleton, his editor at FS&G. Dear God, why had he put all these people ahead of Steve Ames? Steve was his lifeline.

Down on the desert floor three hundred yards away, the insane cop had taken off the helmet and was kicking sand over Johnny's '86 Harley drag. At this distance he looked 2 like a kid pulling a tantrum. That was fine. If he intended to cover the whole thing, Johnny would have plenty of time to make his call . . . if the phone cooperated, that was. The ROAM light was flashing, and that was a good sign, but the second transmission-bar was still flickering

"Come on, come on," Johnny said to the cellular phone in his shaking, blood-grimy hands. "Please, sweetheart okay? Please." He punched the NAME/MENU button again and STEVE appeared. He dropped his thumb onto the SEND button and squeezed it. Then he held the phone to his ear bending over even farther to the right and peering out of the bottom of the window as he did so. The cop was still kicking sand over the Harley's engine-block.

The phone began to ring in Johnny's ear, but he knew he wasn't home free yet. He had tapped into the Roamer network, that was all. He was still a step away from Steve Ames. A long step.

"Come on, come on, come on A drop of sweat ran into his eye. He used a knuckle to wipe it away.

The phone stopped ringing. There was a click. "Wel-come to the Western Roaming Network!" a cheery robot voice said. "Your call is being routed! Thank you for your patience and have a nice day!"

"Never mind the seventies shit, just hurry the fuck up," Johnny whispered.

Silence from the phone. In the desert, the cop stepped back from the bike, looking at it as if trying to decide if he had done enough in the way of camouflage. In the dirty paper-choked back seat of the cruiser, Johnny Marinville began to cry. He couldn't help it. In a bizarre way it was like wetting his pants again, only upside down. "No," he whispered. "No, not yet, you're not done yet, not with the wind blowing like it is, you better do a little more, please do a little more."

The cop stood there looking down at the bike, his shadow now seeming to stretch out across half a mile of desert, and Johnny peered at him through the bottom of the window with his clotted hair in his eyes and the phone mashed against his right ear. He let out a long, shaky sigh of relief as the cop stepped forward and began to kick sand again, this time spraying it over the Harley's handlebars.

In his ear the telephone began to ring, and this time the sound was scratchy and distant. If the signal was going through - and the quality of this ring seemed to indicate that it was - another Motorola telephone, this one on the dashboard of a Ryder truck somewhere between fifty and two hundred and fifty miles east of John Edward Mar-inville's current position, was now ringing.

Down in the desert, the cop went on kicking and kicking, burying the handlebars of Johnny's scoot.

Two rings. ., three rings . . . four.

He had one more, two at the most, before another robot voice came on the line and told him that the customer he was calling was either out of range or had left the vehicle. Johnny, still crying, closed his eyes. In the throbbing, red-tinged darkness behind his lids he saw the Ryder truck parked in front of a roadside gas station/general store just west of the Utah - Nevada state line. Steve was inside, buying a pack of his damned cigars and goofing with the counter girl, while outside, on the Ryder's dashboard, the cellular phone - Steve's half of the corn-link Johnny's agent had insisted upon - rang in the empty cab.

Five rings. . .

And then, distant, almost lost in static but sounding like the voice of an angel bent down from heaven all the same, he heard Steve's flat West Texas drawl: "Hello . . . you boss?"

An eastbound semi blew by outside, rocking the cruiser in its backwash. Johnny barely noticed, and made no attempt to flag the driver. He probably wouldn't have done even if his attention hadn't been focused on the tele-phone and Steve's tenuous voice. The rig was doing seventy at least. What the hell was the driver going to see in the two-tenths of a second it would take him to pass the parked cruiser, especially through the thick dust matted on the windows?

He drew in breath through his nose and hawked back blood, ignoring the pain, wanting to clear his voice as much as he could.

"Steve! Steve, I'm in trouble. I'm in bad trouble!"

There was a heavy crackle of static in his ear and he was sure he'd lost Steve, but when it cleared he heard: up, boss? Say again!"

"Steve, it's Johnny! Do you hear me?"

". . .hear you. . . What's. . ." Another crackle. It almost completely buried the next word, but Johnny thought it might have been "trouble." I hear you, what's the trouble2 God, let that not just he wishful thinking. Please God. . .

The cop had stopped kicking sand again. He stepped away for another critical look at his handiwork, then turned and began to plod back toward the road, head down, hatbrim shading his face, hands plunged deep into his pockets. And then, with a sense of mounting horror Johnny realized he had no idea what to tell Steve. All his attention had been focused on making the call, ramming it through by sheer willpower, if that was what it took.

Now what?

He had no clear idea of where he was, only that - "I'm west of Ely on Highway 50," he said. More sweat ran into his eyes, stinging. "I'm not sure how far west forty miles at least, probably more. There's an RV pulled off the road a little farther up from me. There's a cop not a state cop, a townie, I think, but I don't know which town . . . I didn't see it on the door. . . I don't even know his name . . ." He was talking faster and faster as the cop got closer and closer; soon he would be babbling.

Take it easy, he's still a hundred yards away, you 'ye got plenty of time. For the love of God, just do what comes naturally - do what they pay you for, do what you've been doing all your life. Communicate, for Christ's sake!

But he had never had to do it for his life. To make money, to be known in the right circles, to occasionally raise his voice in the roar of the brave old lion, yes, all those things, but never for his literal life. And if the cop looked up out of his head-down plod and saw him. ., he was crouched down but the phone's antenna was sticking up, of course, it had to be sticking up. . .

"He took my bike, Steve. He took my bike and drove it out into the desert. He covered it up with sand, but the way the wind's blowing. . . it's out in the desert a mile or so east of the RV I told you about and north of the road. You might see it, if the sun's still up."

He swallowed.

"Call the cops - the state cops. Tell them I've been grabbed by a cop who's blond and huge - I mean, this guy's a fucking giant. Have you got that?"

Nothing from the phone but windy silence with an occasional burst of static knifing through it.

"Steve! Steve, are you there?"

No. He wasn't.

There was only one transmission-bar showing in the phone's display window now, and no one was there. He had lost the connection, and he'd been concentrating so hard on what he was saying that he had no idea when it had happened, or how much Steve might have heard.

Johnny, are you sure you got through to him at all?

That was Terry's voice, a voice he sometimes loved and sometimes hated. Now he hated it. Hated it worse than any voice he had ever heard in his life, it seemed. Hated it even worse for the sympathy he heard in it.

Are you sure you didn 'tjust imagine the whole thing?

"No, he was there, he was there, sonofabitch was there," Johnny said. He heard the pleading quality in his own voice and hated that, too. "He was, you bitch. For a few seconds, at least."

Now the cop was only fifty yards away. Johnny shoved the antenna down with the heel of his left hand, flipped the mouthpiece closed, and tried to drop the phone back into his right pocket. The flap was closed. The phone fell into his lap, then bounced to the floor. He felt around frantically for it, at first finding nothing but crumpled papers - DARE anti-drug handouts, for the most part - and hamburger wrappers coated with ancient grease. His fin-gers closed on something narrow, not what he wanted, but even the brief glance he gave it before tossing it away chilled him. It was a little girl's plastic barrette.

Never mind it, you've got no time to think about what a kid might've been doing in the back of his car. Find your damn phone, he must almost be here - Yes. Almost. He could hear the crunch-scuffle of the big cop's boots even over the wind, which had now grown strong enough to rock the cruiser on its springs when it gusted.

Johnny's hand found a nest of styrofoam coffee cups, and, amid them, his phone. He seized it, dropped it in his jacket pocket, and pushed the snap closed. When he sat up again, the cop was coming around the front of the car, bent over at the waist so he could peer through the wind-shield. His face was more sunburned than ever, almost blistered in places. In fact, his lower lip actually was blis-tered, Johnny saw, and there was another blistery spot at his right temple.

Good. That doesn't cross my eyes in the slightest.

The cop opened the driver's-side door, leaned in, and stared through the mesh between the front seat and the back. His nostrils flared as he sniffed. To Johnny, each one of them looked roughly the size of a bowling alley.

"Did you puke in the back of my cruiser, Lord Jim? Because if you did, the first thing you're gonna get when we hit town is a big old spoon."

"No," Johnny said. He could feel fresh blood trickling down his throat and his voice was fogging up again. "I dry-heaved, but I didn't puke." He was actually relieved by what the cop had said. The first thing you're gonna get when we hit town indicated that he didn't intend to drag him out of the car, blow his brains out, and bury him next to his scoot.

Unless he's trying to lull me. Soothe me down, make it easier for him to do. . . well, to do whatever.

"You scared?" the cop inquired, still leaning in and looking through the mesh. "Tell me the truth, Lord Jimmy, I'll know a lie. Tak!"

"Of course I'm scared." "Course" came out "gorse," as if he had a bad cold.

"Good." He dropped behind the wheel, took off the hat, looked at it. "Doesn't fit," he said. "Folk-singing bitch ruined the one that did. Never sang 'Leavin' on a Fucking Jet Plane,' either."

"Too bad," Johnny said, not having the slightest idea what the cop was talking about.

"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 Johnny's left knee, squeezing it.

"Sit up!" Johnny yelled. "You're crushing my leg! Sit up and let me pull it out! Jesus, you're killing me!"

The cop made no reply and the pressure on Johnny's already outraged left leg increased. 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!" Johnny yelled, the word popping out in a red-misted coughing spasm before he could pull it back. The cop seemed not to notice that, either. He sat with his head lowered and his fingers tapping lightly on the wheel. His breath was wheezing in his throat, and for a moment Johnny wondered if the man was mocking him. He didn't think so. I hope it's asthma, he thought. And I hope you choke on it.

"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.

Johnny opened his mouth to say something else, then closed it again. He was in terrible pain, all right, the worst he could remember, even worse than the gallstone he had passed in '89, but he still didn't want to die. And some-thing in the cop's posture, as if he were very far away in his own head, deciding something important, suggested that death might be close.

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."

Johnny said nothing, only waited. His heart was beating slowly but very hard in his chest.

"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?"

Johnny opened his mouth, then closed it again. To speak or not to speak, that was the question.

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. Johnny moved instinctively, sliding to the left, trying to get away from those huge dark holes.

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, Johnny thought, and then: But what good would that do? He wouldn't see anything but the roof of the fucking car. What in the hell is going on here?

"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," Johnny said in a trembling voice. "Pneuma is the old Gnostic word for spirit. Sarx is the body. You said, correct me if I'm wrong - " Just not with the shotgun, please don't correct me with the shotgun " - that I've ignored my spirit in favor of my body. And you could be right. You could very well be."

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 dinner is not a chicken. Pneuma. . . soma. . . and s-s-s.- - "

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 pinning Johnny's left knee again), and let fly. What came out of his mouth and nose was not mucus but blood and red filmy stuff that looked like nylon mesh. 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.

Johnny clapped his hands to his face and screamed. There was no way not to scream. He could feel his eye-balls pulsing in their sockets, could feel adrenaline roar into his system as the shock-reaction set in.

"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 to the floormat with a plop.

Johnny closed his eyes behind his hands and moaned.

"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?"

Johnny didn't answer, only kept his hands over his face and his eyes closed. It occurred to him that quite possibly none of this was happening, that he was in a nuthouse some-place, having the world's ugliest hallucination. But his better, deeper mind knew that wasn't true. The stench of what the man had sneezed out -

He's dying, he's got to he dying, that's infection and internal bleeding, he's sick, his mental illness is only one symptom of something else, some radiation thing, or maybe rabies, or. . . or. . .

The cop hauled the Caprice cruiser around in a U, pointing it east. Johnny kept his hands over his face a little longer, trying to get himself under control, then low-ered them and opened his eyes. What he saw out the right-hand window made his jaw drop.

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

He turned and looked out the other window, and here were more of them, sitting in the dust, in the blazing sun of late afternoon, watching the police-cruiser go by. Is that a symptom, too? he asked himself. What you're see-ing out there, is that a symptom, too? so, how come I can see it?

He looked out the cruiser's back window. The coyotes were peeling away as soon as they passed, he saw, loping off into the desert.

"You'll learn, Lord Jim," the cop said, and Johnny turned back toward him. He saw gray eyes staring from the rearview mirror. One was filmed with blood. "Before your time is up, I think you'll understand a great deal more than you do now."

Ahead was a sign by the side of the road, an arrow pointing the way toward some little town or other. The cop put on his turnhlinker, although there was no one to see it.

"I'm taking you to the classroom," the big cop said.

"School will be in shortly."

He made the right turn, the cruiser lifting onto two wheels and then settling hack. It headed south, toward the cracked bulwark of the open-pit mine and the town huddled at its base.