To Make Death Love Us (3 page)

Will reached
forward—his ears pricked for any grating sound, for any sudden shift in the truck—and switched
the key to "off." Then he reached over a bit more and turned the headlamps off. Might as well
save the battery.

He eased back into
the seat and breathed again in the pitch dark. His body was drenched with sweat, his face as pale
as old death. He stared out the shattered windshield.

It was as black as
a dead eye on the mountain.

Will Carney's mouth
was too dry to make spit. Yet he wanted the harsh smoke of a cigarette more than he could ever
remember wanting anything in his life.

Trouble was—he let
himself admit it—there had been a million and one things he'd wanted in his life in just that
way.

"Let me have just
this one thing, God, and I'll never ask for another thing." Now, how many times had he said
that?

After he stopped
calling on an unhearing God to pop jelly beans into his mouth, he'd thought of a vague any­body
to grant his futile and petty wishes. Later still, he'd ask in the name of the "juggler" and that
meant that there was no God for Will Carney, no gift givers or treasure makers, only himself,
Will Carney, bellied up to the rotten business of living. Naked, alone.

All right. All
right-ee.

It's that way,
then, and no other.

Will learned to
smile and laugh all over his face so that people didn't notice his sharp eyes watching them to
see what he could charm them out of. He learned the manner of words like "Ma'm; sir; good Lord;
mercy, baby; honey this and honey that; and sweet lover." Words much abused; words that didn't
mean much, the way he meant them, had nothing to do with what he was saying inside
himself, but which made songs for other
people, it seemed.

Will combed his
hair in the middle when he was a youth, thinking it made him look a touch old-fashioned and
therefore, unthreatening. He treasured the dimple marks at the sides of his mouth. They had
earned him a bed and a meal when hard work would not. He admired the set of his own shoulders and
padded the jackets of his suits to square them better.

In those overblown
suits, he looked somewhat like a turtle, ready at the first sign of danger to pop back in his
shell. Even so, he was called, more often than not, good looking. Most people he met never saw
past his smile.

He sat in the
darkened cab like a puppet with severed strings. He fished a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt
pocket and shook one out. He trembled. His muscles pained from doing even that simple thing, so
afraid was he that any movement would send them plunging over into the dark, into the death that
awaited them all.

Will started to
stretch his hand to the cigarette lighter set in the dashboard. He hesitated, afraid to lean
forward lest it be his last act. A match flared in the hands of Marco.

Will turned and
looked into the man's pain-wracked eyes. He knew the mute had been staring at Will in the
blackness. The Strong Man's face was deathly white in the flare of the match. He was still losing
blood. Perhaps he would die of it.

The eyes of the
silent Strong Man were like two pin points of wondering pain. It was old pain and new pain. Those
eyes in the dark reminded Will of someone. Funny at a place like this, at a time like now, he
should think of that.

He
remembered.

A man named Thorne
had come through the county seat one day when Will Carney was fourteen. The man sold medicines of
a sort, mostly made of alcohol. It was all right for God-fearing people to have a nip of the
demon's brew, if it tasted of herbs with a vague claim of being curative and lay bitter as sin
itself on the tongue. To draw a crowd and get the unsophisticated fools thirsty, this man Thorne
entertained them with some fancy juggling.

As the little balls
sped around, cutting patterns in the air, Will prayed that if he could be blessed with the skill
of such a wonder he'd never ask for another thing as long as he lived. Thorne saw the marvel of
his juggling in the boy's bright eyes, an admiration ... no ... adoration of a quality he'd never
seen before, and Thorne found himself making special play to that round-eyed audience of
one.

When the show was
over, the crowd scattered away on their own business, and Thorne invited the boy to try his hand.
Before the hot afternoon was done, Will, all sweaty with exertion and cheerful beyond bearing,
could keep three balls in the air at one time with one hand and scratch himself with the
other.

The juggler made
much over it and asked after the boy's relatives and family. There were none. Will Carney was a
ward of the county, in a manner of speaking. And so Will left that night to join what he believed
to be the wonderful world of carnival and circus.

They camped along
the roadways and cooked their night meal. In the fireglow, the juggler would stare at young Will
sometimes, as he told stories of wonders past believing. It was then, sometimes, in the middle of
some incredible lie, that the old juggler's eyes would spark with hate, with a bitterness within
himself. Will would close his eyes, then, so as not to see the darkness in the old man's
eyes.

There came a time,
when Will was sixteen, when the hate in the juggler's eyes could not be closed out. The old man
came across the fire at Will, with his hands out like hooks meant to grasp and choke. A knife
flashed in Will's hands, his first instinctive reaction to sudden attack and without quite
meaning to, he impaled the old man on it.

The old man sighed
as if he felt the tide going out and fell across Will, one leg dragging in the fire. Will rolled
him over, pulling the old man's leg out of the fire, knife slipping from his hand. Will's eyes
were wide with sur­prise, with hurt, with disbelief.

The old man, dying
slowly, sighed yet again. "Just not quick enough," he said.

"What the hell got
into you!" screamed Will. "Why did you do it?"

The old man said,
"You took my woman in Bennet City into your bed. She belonged to me. You shouldn't have done
it."

Will was stunned.
"I
took
her! Why, you damned old fool, she
took
me into hers. And she didn't belong
to you. She was for everybody who had the price and freely said so."

"She was mine,"
insisted the dying juggler. "You had no right to her."

"She wasn't
important, not worth dying for," said Will. "I just wanted to learn about making love. It could
have been anybody. It just happened to be her."

"You seduced her,"
accused the old man. "That isn't right."

"You're crazy. When
she wasn't giving it away, she was selling it. At least, that's what everyone said. Didn't you
know? You had to know," said Will.

"But I loved her,"
the old juggler said, and softly began to cry.

"But she was a
prostitute," protested Will. "She didn't
belong to you. She didn't even belong to herself. She wasn't ever a purchase, just a
rental, as the song says."

But the old man
went on, as one deaf. "You knew I saw her as mine, pretend or no. You had no right to her. There
were plenty more you could have had as easy." He coughed. Flies gathered in a swarm around the
red gash in his chest. The knife had gone in deep.

Will shook his
head, as if angry at the flies that had gathered.

The old man's eyes
still flashed with anger, with the ages old hatred of man over woman. "You bought her then, with
the money I gave you. My money! You had no right."

Will cursed
himself, cursed the stubborn old man dying at his feet. He understood the games of life, the
risks and sometimes the reasons, the ways to win and to lose. He had some insights into the
things men do to "get by." But even at his age, young as he was, the terrible need most men had
to tell lies to themselves and then believe them, still amazed him. The old man's illusions that
he was loved by a whore who loved none who walked the face of this earth, was a thing past his
understanding. It was a blind­ness he himself might be prone to someday, for he could not
understand it in others.

"I never paid her,
not with money, anyway. All I did was smile at her. That was all. I swear I never paid her. Never
more than a smile. Why did she take me into her bed? Maybe because I had never been with a woman
and she knew it. I think she understood that and wanted to cure me of it. Why shouldn't I have
gone with her?"

The old man
coughed, blood flecking the corners of his lips.

"Because I'm old
and getting older. Because of what I taught you about making balls stay up in the
air."

"No."

"For friendship,
then." The old man was getting weaker.

"No."

"For the love of
God."

"No."

"In the name of the
juggler, then," said the old man, shuddering, dying with his eyes open.

Will Carney bowed
his head, tears streaming down his face.

"Yes. In the name
of the juggler," he said.

So that was where
the saying had come to him. Will had almost forgotten that.

He dragged the
smoke into his lungs. He enjoyed it. Didn't have to worry about dying of lung cancer, since he
wasn't going to live through the night. That thought scared him all over again. His insides
churned and he had to fight to keep from throwing up.

"Mr. Carney,"
Paulette shouted from inside the van. "What am I supposed to do? I got to pee so bad."

Maybe some other
time Will would have laughed at that but not now.

"Don't you move,
goddamn it!" Fear was like a black beast crawling down his throat, attacking his spine. "You just
do it right where you're sitting!"

"But I'm wedged in
standing up," she cried, obviously distressed.

"I don't care if
you're upside down! I say you don't move a goddamn inch and you goddamn well better
not!"

Will took another
drag on the cigarette and was fool­ishly cheered by the glow. It was beginning to burn his
fingers. He spit into his palm—where the spit came from he wouldn't know—and let the glowing coal
sizzle out. It sounded like the hiss of a man's last breath.

"We got to do
something," he said to Marco, though he knew the deaf-mute Strong Man couldn't hear a word of it.
"This rain will keep washing the dirt and rock away until there's nothing left for the wheels to
stand on. What the hell we gonna do? Jesus Christ, it's dark!"

Will turned his
head, staring in the dark.

"Wish I knew what
you were thinking. Sitting there bleeding in the dark. You bastard! I suppose you blame it all on
me. I bet you're staring hate through me. I'll bet you can see in the dark, too, you freak son of
a bitch."

Will flicked the
switch for the overhead light. It was burned out. He reached over—slow, real slow—to flip on the
headlights again. All his resting muscles came awake and hurt him. He knew he'd been sitting
there tight as a fiddle string and not resting at all.

"I got to have some
goddamn light. I'm no animal. I can't see in the dark like you seem to do."

Marco had his head
back, eyes closed, suffering.

"Jesus,-you
bastard, don't tell me you're asleep." Some­how the idea seemed to frighten Will.

Marco opened his
eyes as though he'd heard. He looked at the twin cones of light boring holes through the rainy
night. With some show of pain, he moved his damaged arm forward to the glove compartment and
thumbed it open.

The cab lurched no
more than an inch. It seemed a fall of a mile that would never end, to those trapped in the
truck.

Marco pulled out a
repair lamp, its protective wire cage around the bulb and its extension cord all coiled neatly
around itself.

The other end of
the cord had a gadget that fitted into the cigarette lighter and ran off the truck's battery. He
handed it to Will with a gesture that indicated Will could plug it in without disturbing the
truck's precarious bal­ance.

Marco snapped his
fingers to attract Will's attention. Will looked up from the glowing bulb in his hands and caught
the direction of the deaf-mute's glance. Nodding that he understood, Will shut off the headlamps
to con­serve the battery.

The lamp was a
comfort. And a curse. A curse because now Will could see Marco's eyes. They were regarding him
softly. Were they asking Will Carney to make the necessary moves to save them all? Or did they
say that since it was his, Marco's, fault that they all were in this deadly place, that he was
sorry. Or did those eyes, which seemed to bore through him, reflect the hatred that Will
deserved, the contempt he often saw in the eyes of his charges?

Will had to turn
away from the blood-spattered figure beside him. He stared out the front window, out into the
certain death that awaited them all.