Hymn Page 4

  There, rest. No more suffering for you. I know where you’ve gone, and it’s good.

  He thought that he wouldn’t be able to sleep but, after half an hour, his eyes closed and his breathing grew deep and harsh, and he was slowly swallowed by the night.

  He dreamed that there was a marble-grey face pressed close to his bedroom window, watching him for almost an hour with the strangest expression of bereavement and greed. It might have been real, he might not have dreamed it at all. But whatever it was, it faded when the night faded, and by the time that morning broke, there was nobody in the garden at all.

  Four

  They smelled burning on the wind from three to four miles away, long before the bus came into view. After a while, they began to run into occasional drifts of pale filthy smoke.

  If they hadn’t been so hungry, if they hadn’t been so tired, they probably would have realized immediately that it was burning flesh.

  But Ric wound down the patrol-car window and sniffed two or three times. He gave a nod of approval. ‘Can you believe it?’ he remarked. ‘Somebody’s having a cookout.’

  ‘Oh, for sure,’ growled Sergeant Jim Griglak, without taking the King Edward cigar from his mouth. ‘A hundred-and-fifteen in the shade, in the middle of the desert, at twenty after three in the afternoon, and somebody’s having a cookout?’

  ‘No, come on, smell it, that’s a cookout,’ Ric assured him. ‘Baby back ribs, charred on the outside, tender on the inside. A nice frosty jug of margaritas. Egg and avocado and green-onion salad, with crispy tacos, salsa, and a little sprinkling of cilantro.’

  ‘Munoz, my friend, you’re hallucinating,’ retorted the sergeant. ‘If that’s barbecued anything, that’s barbecued Goodyear.’ He took the cigar out of his mouth and tapped the firm fedora-grey ash on to the floormat. ‘Somebody’s overheated, or blown out a tyre. Now, you want to shut that frigging window before we dry-fry?’

  Ric wound up the window. ‘It sure smells like a cookout,’ he insisted.

  Jim Griglak continued to drive at the same monotonous fifty-five, his mountainous shoulders hunched, his huge hands grasping the steering-wheel as if he were driving a tiny fairground bumper-car. All around them, the scrubby off-white hills of the Anza Borrego Desert were blinded with heat, hill after undulating hill, with the highway running undeviatingly up and down them like the dusty sloughed-off skin of a huge desert snake.

  Up they went, and the next valley came into view. Deserted and baking-hot, just like the valley before it, and the valley before that. The sky was so blue it didn’t seem to fit together with the horizon properly, a badly printed jigsaw. Down they went, and the previous valley disappeared from sight.

  ‘This whole barbecue thing is a closed book to me,’ Jim Griglak sniffed. ‘I can set fire to my food any time I feel like it, no trouble. All it takes is a can of unleaded and a match. Who needs mesquite wood at $7 a sack and a $15 apron with a picture of a whore’s underwear on it?’

  ‘It’s not just a question of heat and meat,’ Ric insisted. ‘It’s all in the marinades. You should try chilli-and-tomato with your chicken, teriyaki with your pork. Maybe some lime and yogurt with your lamb.’

  Jim Griglak shook his head, and sucked hard at his cigar, which, out of sheer cheapness, had decided to extinguish itself. ‘Munoz,’ he said, ‘you watch too many of these faggy cookery shows. You should’ve come to Norm Fox’s barbecue last year. Norm was up to his bermudas in fancy marinades, but what did we get? Coalburgers, chicken à la coal, shrimp coaletti, coalfurters. Barbecue? That was a frigging cremation.’

  Ric didn’t let Jim Griglak upset him. Jim was huge—6’ 3” in his conspicuously self-darned socks and probably well over sixteen stone, if his bathroom scales had been able to protest out loud. He was country-freckled and slow and wise, and just a little sad, but he was one of the best sergeants that Ric had ever worked with. Ric had seen him shoot an armed crack-dealer between the eyes so quick that it was all over before Ric had even unholstered his .357, and another time he had seen him pursuing a fleeing wetback through a beanfield with all the speed and majesty of a charging rhino. The Mexican himself had stopped running just to watch the spectacle of Jim Griglak thundering towards him, a whole lifetime of Pabst Blue Ribbons and cheese’n’baconburgers in undulating motion.

  Ric was well aware that—in return—Jim considered him to be an irredeemable pantywaist—a law-enforcing yuppie. He was one of the new generation of well-groomed career-conscious highway patrolmen who always wore Reynolds Engineering sunglasses, drank Carta Blanca beer and went to Space in Time at La Jolla to have their hair cut and their little Magnum moustaches trimmed. In spite of that, Ric and Jim maintained a cautious truce between them, a truce that occasionally flirted with genuine affection. There was, after all, no real contest between them. By the time Ric came up for senior promotion, Jim would have handed in his badge and hung up his gun, and retired to his two-bedroomed chalet in the Cuyamaca forest, just him and his shaggy crossbreed dog Akron and his pale moonlike belly and the real moon and miles of fragrant manzanita.

  Ric said, ‘You know something, Sergeant? You should come round to my place. I’ll show you how to barbecue. It’s something in the blood, you know what I mean? No Yankee ever knew how to barbecue.’

  ‘This smoke’s goddamned thick,’ Jim interrupted him. ‘Goddamned what d’you call it?’ He flapped his hand, trying to think of the word. ‘Pungent.’ He was a halting but devoted reader of It Pays To Increase Your Word Power.

  ‘Well, that’s the whole key to a successful barbecue,’ Ric told him. ‘You have to keep on spraying the mesquite with . . .’

  He stopped as abruptly as a switched-off radio. They had topped another rise, and ahead of them lay just another valley, glaring and dusty. But two or three hundred feet north of the highway, amongst the thorn and the scrub and the prickly pear, smoked the blackened skeleton of a burned-out bus.

  ‘Holy Cremona,’ Jim breathed. He didn’t have to say ‘There’s people in it . . .’ because they had both seen them the instant that they crested the rise. Burned people, maybe a dozen of them, maybe more. And for the past three miles, they had been bantering each other about hamburgers and ribs and chicken kebabs. Because of the smell. Because of these people, burning.

  ‘Oh, Mary Mother of God,’ whispered Ric. ‘Don’t let this be.’

  As they descended the hill, they could see that the ribcage structure of the bus was still blossoming with tiny orange flames, almost as if it had been decorated with marigolds, and that its tyres were still thickly smoldering.

  The hot afternoon wind was blowing from the southwest, and it was hanging out the ragged brown smoke all across the valley.

  ‘Oh, Mary Mother of God,’ Ric repeated quietly. ‘Don’t let this be.’

  Jim picked up his r/t microphone and said matter-of-factly, as if he were ordering dinner at a Korean take-out, ‘One-four-six, this is one-four-six. Doris, this is Jim Griglak. I have a multiple traffic fatality here on Highway 78, just about fifteen miles due east of Borrego Springs. I’m going to need choppers and firetrucks and ambulances, make that at least ten ambulances, repeat ten—we have a considerable number of casualties here—and backup. I’ll get back to you, okay?’

  ‘Don’t let this be,’ Ric whispered, more to the Holy Virgin than to Jim as the patrol car jounced off the highway and sped across the scrub toward the burned-out bus, a plume of dust rising high behind it.

  ‘It will be, all right,’ Jim assured him. He took a last suck on his extinguished cigar, and then tossed the butt out of the window. Fire department regulations forbade smoking at the scene of a blaze. ‘You can pray all you like, Munoz, but it frigging will be.’

  They swerved to a halt about thirty feet away from the bus, and climbed out. Ric wrestled out the fire-extinguisher, but Jim called across the roof of the car, ‘Forge it, Munoz. They’re all dead. Better to leav
e everything the way it is.’

  Ric nodded, and gave him an oddly clogged-up ‘Sure’, obediently replacing the fire-extinguisher. He took off his sunglasses and followed Jim closer to the bus, glancing at it with hesitant up-and-down motions of his head, and swallowing, desperately wanting not to look, but knowing that he had to. He didn’t know how Jim managed to stay so goddamned calm. Ric had been with the California Highway Patrol for six-and-a-half years and, like all patrolmen, he had seen some shockers. Bloody and scarcely recognizable children, jet-propelled through car windscreens because their parents hadn’t bothered to buckle them up. Irrationally cheerful men, crushed flat as cardboard from the chest down, still joking and asking for a cigarette. Women lying in the road screaming, unable to get up, because they had both of their arms torn off.

  He had seen people trapped behind brown smoked-up windows, burning alive, pleading with him, screaming at him, ‘Save me! Save me!’ but unreachable because of the heat. He had never seen anything like this.

  Maybe it was the silence that affected him so much. Usually there were sirens and traffic and people shouting. Out here in the desert there was nothing but the warm soft fluffing of the breeze and the ping-tikk-pinging of slowly cooling metal. Occasionally one of the tyres flared up, but for the most part the fire was out now.

  Maybe it was the dense charred-pork smell of burned human flesh. It saturated the air, so that every breath he took was greasy with it. Oh Christ, he thought to himself, I’m breathing in dead people. I’m actually breathing them in.

  It looked like an ordinary bus, a ten-wheeler GMC. Most of its paint was burned off and what was left of its aluminium bodywork was darkly discoloured, but Ric could make out the words Balboa Hi-Way Bus Ren in brownish-red letters, on the side.

  The blackened driver was still sitting in his seat; still grasping his carbonized steering-wheel. A rough headcount came up with twelve more passengers, men and women. They were all dead, no doubt about it, although the fire had charred them unevenly. Those sitting on the left-hand side of the bus were burned into tiny crispy monkeys, their teeth grinning brown through their black flaking skin, their little fists raised in front of them as if they had all been drumming, their drumsticks suddenly confiscated.

  Those sitting on the right-hand side, particularly those at the back, had been less devastatingly charred, and one Hispanic girl of about twenty-four years old looked almost untouched at first. It was only when Ric walked around the back of the bus that he saw that her black hair was all burned off down one side of her head, and her pretty floral-pink sundress had been incinerated from her left knee to her left shoulder. He could see her scorched white panties and it made him feel like a ghoul.

  Ric and Jim met each other round on the far side of the bus. Ric took out his handkerchief, folded it into a triangle, and pressed it against his nose and mouth.

  ‘Some cookout, hunh?’ asked Jim, although he was far from laughing.

  ‘What the hell do you think happened here?’ Ric asked him, unsteadily. ‘You think maybe the gas tank exploded, something like that?’

  Jim grunted and hunkered down, and examined the underside of the bus. ‘No signs of explosion. Nothing’s ripped apart, no distortion. Gas tank’s intact, luggage is burned but not blown apart. This baby just caught fire and that was that.’

  He stood up, and wiped the perspiration from his forehead with his fat ginger arm. ‘It can happen, I guess, especially with fuel injection. But you don’t often see it with diesel.’

  He squinted at the tyre-tracks that the bus had left in the dust between here and the highway. ‘No signs of any other vehicle involved. The driver headed straight here, no swerving, no skids. It’s hard to say for sure, but it doesn’t look like he was panicking none.’

  ‘His whole goddamned bus was on fire and he wasn’t panicking? It doesn’t make sense.’

  Jim reached into his shirt pocket and took out a roll of wintergreen Life-Savers. He offered one to Ric but Ric shook his head. ‘Nobody was panicking,’ he observed, tucking a Life-Saver into his cheek. ‘Look at them, they’re all sitting in their seats, no heaps of bodies next to the door, nobody anywhere near the emergency exits.’

  Ric walked back along the side of the bus and stared up at the girl in the floral-pink sundress. The unburned side of her face was Spanish-looking and remarkably pretty, and her right eye was open and staring at him, or just past him, anyway. The extraordinary thing was that she looked like she was smiling. She looked happy.

  You, young lady, you’re a goddamned conundrum, you are, thought Ric. How can you smile when your legs are on fire? I mean, Jesus—how much that must have hurt.

  Jim came up and stood beside him and stared at the girl, too.

  ‘She’s smiling,’ said Ric, with a nervous laugh.

  ‘Naw,’ Jim’s Life-Saver rattled between his teeth. ‘It’s the heat, shrinks the facial muscles, same way a steak curls up. Saw a guy burning in a truck once, trapped, couldn’t get out. Looked like he was laughing his head off. I felt like calling out, what’s the frigging joke?’

  They walked back to the patrol car. Ric glanced back once or twice, and the girl was still staring at him with that single expressionless prune-brown eye.

  Jim reached into the car and lifted out the radio microphone. ‘Doris? Jim Griglak. Listen, tell the coroner we got thirteen of them. That’s right, a baker’s dozen. Yeah, that’s right, baked pretty good, too.’

  There was nothing else for them to do but wait. They stood leaning against their patrol car in the wavering afternoon heat, watching the bus tyres burn themselves down to criss-cross hoops of radial-ply steel, and the last few flames around the body framework gutter out. In the distance, from the west, they heard the echoing flacker-flacker-flacker of approaching helicopters.

  ‘You know what we’ve got ourselves here, don’t you, Ric?’ asked Jim, lifting his bulk away from the car. Jim had never called him ‘Ric’ before.

  Ric shook his head, conscious that Jim was going to tell him something serious.

  ‘We’ve got ourselves a massacre, that’s what we got.’

  ‘You think this was deliberate?’

  ‘Come on, Munoz, use your grey matter. This was no traffic accident, for Christ’s sake. You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to see that. This is a massacre. A crack massacre, or a sect massacre, or maybe both. Santaria maybe. You know the kind of thing. Candles and beads and plaster madonnas and sacrificed chickens, and the kids with the Uzis will get you if the voodoo-dolls don’t. Whoever it was, they were seriously less-than-amiable.’

  He shook his head in exasperation. ‘What I can’t understand is why they all look so frigging happy about it.’

  ‘It sure seems kind of unusual,’ Ric agreed.

  ‘Unusual? I’d call it frigging unreal. I mean, think about it. A busload of people get themselves driven out to the desert. Very nice, very scenic. Then they get burned to death with happy smiles on their faces and without making the slightest attempt to escape. That, my friend, is what I personally define as a problem I could do without. A question which may be susceptible to solution, but to which I don’t care to know the answer.’

  They were still waiting for the first helicopters to come into sight when Ric noticed something shifting at the top of the ridge, something tawny-brown, maybe a dog or a coyote. He nodded to Jim Griglak and said, ‘Did you see that?’

  Jim Griglak shaded his eyes with his hand.

  ‘I can’t see nothing.’

  ‘Top of the ridge—there, to the left.’

  They glimpsed something of what looked like a shoulder, then an arm. ‘Goddamn it, there’s somebody up there!’ Jim Griglak exclaimed, and then yelled out, ‘Hey! Hey up there! You come on down here! Do you hear me? You come right down here!’

  A dark head bobbed just above the horizon, then ducked away.

  ‘Goddamn it,’ Ji
m cursed. ‘Goddamn it to hell!’ He hitched up his gunbelt, and began to trundle around the burned-out bus and up the slope. Ric started after him, but without turning his head, Jim waved him away. ‘You stay there . . . guard the bus. I’ll get this bastard.’

  Ric watched him as he scaled the dusty, heat-dazzled rocks. His arms pumped, his trousers flapped, his saddlebags bounced with every stride, but he clambered up to the top of the ridge with awesome agility, and disappeared from view.

  Ric turned his head. He could see the first helicopter now, its canopy reflecting a sharp star of sunlight as it came skimming low and fast over the desert hills.

  Ric blinked, and grimaced, and looked around him in deep uncertainty. The helicopter was landing now, and lashing up smoke and dust and fragments of blackened fabric. The hair of the half-burned Hispanic girl flew up over her head like a fright-wig. She seemed to be laughing. A blizzard of ash suddenly burst from the busdriver’s face, and was swept away in the downdraught.

  As the helicopter’s rotors were whip-whistling to a standstill, Jim reappeared on the crest of the ridge. At first he looked as if he were alone, but when he moved aside, Ric saw that he was prodding in front of him an Indian boy of about twelve. The boy came down the slope crabwise, clutching at the rocks. He had long greasy black hair, circular grannie Ray-Bans and a red bandana around his forehead. He was dressed in a grubby Elvis Presley T-shirt and yellow-and-purple bermudas.

  ‘Hey, Sergeant!’ called Ric.

  ‘Yeah, look what I found,’ Jim called back. He nudged the boy down the slope and around the wreck of the bus.

  Two lean young highway patrolmen climbed out of the helicopter and came walking slowly across toward them, staring at the bus in disbelief.

  ‘Jesus,’ said one of them, wiping the sweat from his face with his neckscarf. ‘What the hell happened here?’

  ‘I was hoping Geronimo here might be able to tell us,’ Jim replied. ‘What’s your name, son? Were you here when this bus went up?’