Читать книгу Made to Break - D. Foy - Страница 10

CHRISTMAS EVE WORD GOT OUT LUCILLE HAD been taken by the real world, of corporate jobs and big-big coin. Christmas Day the scene was on. As for that affair, the only thing I know for sure is some time close to three or four we laid into a mound of dope. But now the New Year was two days off, and what had been a mound of dope was just a dirty mirror…

Locked into four-by at eighty-plus, we were headed for Tahoe, and Dinky’s family cabin. The radio was playing some power-pop group, Ring Finger, I think it was.

I gave it all up for you,

and I’m happy today,

yeah my sky is blue today!

It’s true little baby,

we’re a thing called us,

all shiny and new—

the brand new me

and super new you!

Of course by the time we hit Bridal Veil Falls, the tank was dry, and we were stuck. Hickory nudged me as she pointed to the sign.

“Romantic,” I said.

“Nice,” Dinky said.

And then we were trekking through rain, to some joint up the road he thought had fuel. An hour and a half got us four blistered feet and a defunct inn that looked like a Swiss chalet. When finally a man brought us gas, we headed down the mountain for more. A pack of tourists had crowded the inn the second time round, waiting for some guy to fix their flat. Basil dropped drawer and stuck his ass to the window while Lucille assaulted the horn. “Idiots!” we shouted…

Truth was the cabin in lights through a swirl of ice and rain. We’d nothing to do but get to the door, but the stairs slipped me up, and I collapsed, and lost my bottle, too… The stars were dead. The night was rage. The earth was sick with danger. Someone moaned, and from the blue I understood: time is a leech… And then a butcher jumped my head, a squat little man with an Abe Lincoln beard and collection of filthy knives. And then when I heard the breaking glass, the butcher turned and vanished…

Basil had smashed a window with his hatchet after Dinky confessed he’d lost his key. Now the giant appeared at the door with an arm swept out in phony cheer. I remembered once a girl called him handsome.

“Entrez-vous,” he said.

“You smell that?” I said about the stink.

“Whoo-wee!” said Lucille.

“I smoke,” Basil said. “I can’t smell dick.”

“I can assure you,” Hickory said. “This is not the smell of dick.”

We headed to the kitchen for glasses and ice, the scent growing stronger, a compound more like mildew and vanilla.

“Oh goody,” Basil said.

There was nothing in the fridge but the little bags of glop people use for wounds.

My hand knocked Basil’s hat to the floor, the porkpie his grandfather gave him a decade back. The doof had been wearing it all this time, every day but Christmas.

“If it’s not one thing,” I said, “it’s your mother.”

Dinky flipped the light. “Christ on a crutch,” he said.

On the floor, in a bamboo cage with pits and dung, lay a lovebird dead as wood.

“Now that,” Basil said, tapping the cage with his boot, “is some weird-ass shit.”

Hickory looked at Dinky. “You’re not going to tell me this was yours, I hope.”

“We’ve never seen the thing.”

“Maybe,” I said, “it was your grandpa’s.”

“Granddad hates animals. He wouldn’t let Dad have a fish.”

Lucille had been picking at her lip so long her mouth looked like a steak. “I had a bird once,” she said. “When we lived in Carolina.”

“That’s very nice, Lucille,” Dinky said. “Thank you for sharing that with us.”

She ignored this and shuffled closer. “It was a finch. Then one day I came home from school, and she was gone.”

“It flew away?” Hickory said.

“Her name was Zoë,” Lucille said, and put a hand to her face. The stink was really nuts. “My father said if he had to hear that racket for one more day, he’d be forced to use his gun.”

“You ever hear a finch?” I said. “Not loud at all. Finches are about the nicest bird around.”

“He hated cleaning its cage, is what I think.”

I left the kitchen as Hickory told Basil to dump the bird. He complained at first, but then a door slammed and slammed again, and there they were, Dinky and Basil, huffing at their smokes.

Lucille had laid out a dog-eared copy of Fear and Loathing next to a stack of discs. She jabbed the On button, then Play—out came “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.”

“So who’s going to get the ice?”

I told her she had two legs.

“Excuse me?”

She was always making people repeat themselves. It gave her notions of power.

“Turn that down,” I said. She waited a second before turning it down. “I said you’ve got two legs.”

“You ought to know. You’ve been staring at them long enough.”

“Check the TV,” Dinky said. “We want to see if they’re still saying it’s going to flood.”

“It’s the day before New Year’s Eve,” Basil said, as if the weather played to dates.

Dinky ran through the channels till he reached a woman with hair like GI Joe’s. On the screen beside her flashed bombed-out streets and men at guns, perched on inexorable tanks. Another face appeared, a weeping crone, trailed by a man with a shapka and fatigues. The anchorwoman sat with considered reserve. Her voice was a tool for faith. Operation Joint Endeavor, she said, appears to have reached a point of…

Dinky squealed like he’d won a prize. “That’s Atherton,” he said. “From our company!” He knelt by the tube and gestured toward some pimply kid in a truck. “Jesus, that’s our whole frigging company!”

“So much for your fifteen minutes, huh, Dink?” I said.

“You know I can’t drink my whiskey without ice,” Lucille said.

“Snow’s good,” Basil said. “Use snow.”

“We’re going to draw straws,” Lucille said. “The two with the shortest get to make a run.”

Dinky shook a bottle. “But we don’t need no ice. We need bourbon. And as we can all see, we have mas bourbon.”

“No mas no more, pinche,” Lucille said, and squeezed Dinky’s ass.

We cut the straw from a broom in the kitchen. Then Basil took the longest, Hickory the next, Lucille after that.

“Welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, well,” Basil said.

“Sorry,” Hickory said.

Dinky looked like he might cry. “Why’s it always me that’s getting the shaft?”

“Cause you’re feeble,” Lucille said. “And jinxed.”

“Hatchet Lady,” Basil said, classic. “So mean.”

“Just remember whose cabin you’re in,” Dinky said. “We’re here for a week.”

I punched Basil’s arm. “Hey, asshole. You get rid of the bird?”

THE ROAD WAS RUNNY AND BLACK, AND WHEN the lights hit the trees they looked like creeping skin. A DJ yammered about our noses and what Jack Frost had done.

“So whose idea was it,” Dinky said. But instead of taking his bait, like usual, I waited. He said, “We know you’re familiar with the word moronic, Andrew. We won’t talk about how we spent the last nine months in a place so cold your pee breaks on the ground. We’ll save that for our golden years. You know what we need?”

I stared at him. He didn’t want an answer. He’d ask you a goddamned question just to answer himself.

“What we need,” he said, “is Hawaii. What we need is Guam. Girls in grass skirts and pigs with apples in their traps. Mai tais is what we need, AJ.” And the gloopy bastard never drove with his hands at ten and two, either. One of them flapped about as he talked while the other hung across the wheel like an old rubber chicken. “How,” he said, “are we ever supposed to get Hickory on her back when all she can think about is misery?”

I fiddled with the radio. I pulled down the visor to hate my face in the mirror. “You take a look in the mirror these days?”

“You know we don’t like mirrors.”

“Look at you. Look at your head. Especially your head. You were planning to get laid with that thing?”

Dinky started coughing so bad he stopped in the road. “We did fine in Germany,” he said. Then he saw my retard’s face and hit the gas. “You know, with the chicks.”

“The chick, you mean. I saw her picture. She looked like a fat albino parrot. Not to mention she’s a professional thief. Not to mention she gave you the clap.”

“Fortunately for us, Uncle Sam takes care of his boys.”

I studied the water on the window as it turned to pearls and marveled at the creatures in their snowbound lairs. I thought about my grandmother, how she answered the phone to say she’d been raped, or lost her child, or found a bag of stones. She hobbled from my flat one day, and when I asked her purpose, she said, Home.

“This thing in four-by?” I said.

“What do we think?”

“We think we should get the lead out.”

The road had just two lanes. Trees flashed by, now sparkling, now black, a strobic land of bugaboos dreamed and real. We saw no cars, no people, not even the twinkle of lights on another unnamed road. The Cruiser heaved with empty cans and cigarette butts, a single dirty sock. And roasted peanuts and peanut shells, Basil had tossed them everywhere, the dashboard, the seats, one was in my hair. It stunk of laundry hampers, and ragamuffin carnivals, sculleries from days of yore…

My old toad once brought me to a creek bottom full of sycamore and oak. Everything shone in hues of green, lancets of sun pushing through the shadows. An odor of struggle suffused the air. It was the odor of springtime, of birth. High overhead a worry of jays had attacked a nest of fledglings. When my toad climbed a stone to piss the creek, I made my way to the tree. Shells lay about, and in fact a fledgling too, blue as tainted meat and with its tiny quaking eyes utterly pathetic. I took stock. Gone as God my old toad was, wandered off, not a soul could tell. I trusted in his return, however, if only to grill me, that much no doubt I’d learned. At my feet the fledgling sawed away with its little grey beak, gasping and sawing with a relentlessness only its mortality in the offing could afford. Christ but what I would’ve given to flee that place, what meager breath as witness to this struggle I myself could draw, the creature’s eyes watching mine, or rather not watching mine, not watching anything likely. To think otherwise had been absurd. They were like drops of shuddering ink, those eyes, so tiny, goddamn it, so sad, so full of such terrible, newborn horror that to call them eyes at all was somehow blasphemous. And the eyes of birds have never been the same. Answer me! they seemed to say. Answer! But I had no answer. And anyhow, I? Not even the nobility of silence was sufficient to that demand. Nothing was sufficient. I poked at the creature with a twig, and then with my toe I flipped it over, and then with my heel I crushed it…

“The army say anything to you about that bark of yours?” I said.

“The army doesn’t say anything unless you get your arm blown off.”

“You could pay down the debt yourself, you know. If you’d just get serious.”

“How much more serious can we get than clearing mines from a war zone in the middle of hellish winter?”

“Pass the bar, Dinky. Do the law.”

“There’s no need to torture us, you know.”

“I’m all gold,” I said, and took another slug. “If nothing else you got the name for it.”

“Now, class,” Dinky said with the nasally voice he assumed to mock himself. “Why is it we think Stuyvesant Wainwright the Fourth has failed the bar six times?” He raised his eyebrows and spoke in singsong cadence. “Because he didn’t learn anything in school but how to do lots and lots of drugs and drink lots and lots of booze. Let that,” he said, “be a lesson in how to fail.”

“And get sick,” I said.

For an instant through the trees the casinos glimmered down the strip. The dealers hung tight in those mad shops, I knew how, working the gamblers to their rings. Where was Hickory—her eyes, her mouth, the voice that purred from it?

“The army,” said Dinky, raising his arm strongman-like. “That takes youth.”

He turned at me to grin. Which is why I thought he might not’ve seen the mudslide on the road, though in truth he had, because all at once his eyes popped out, and we went lurching this way and that until we broke into a spin that closed on a bank of stones.

I woke up to a land of dark. Neither Dinky nor I said a word. We just sat there in the cold, and all that giant black seemed to’ve swallowed up the world. Where were all the lovely people? Where were all the vermin, and where were all the stars?

When finally I got the nerve to look at my friend, he was pinned in his seat by the wheel. It wasn’t until I’d begun to think maybe he was knocked out, maybe even dead, that he wriggled free. Out in the night, he looked like one of those freaks you see on Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, the one abducted by Martians. He stood there for a minute, then staggered off and fell in the mud.

“It used to be when I coughed I heard bees in my head. Now all I hear is fire.”

“Write a poem about it sometime,” I said, and scanned the road.

“AJ… AJ…” And then, “Please.”

“We’re buddies,” I told him. “Remember?”

Mud rushed down the mountain. The rain was an opaque sheet. I held Dinky’s head and waited.

“Get me that bourbon, would you?”

And then we heard an engine, a song for all we cared, followed by lights through the dark and, again, after something like an epoch, a truck round the bend.

“You see that, buddy?” I said, waving my arms. “That’s your guardian angel. We’ll be home in a minute.”

BASIL HAD NO BALLS TO JUMP LUCILLE TILL THE stretch last summer at San Quintín. Dinky had passed out that night, though it wouldn’t have mattered. Sooner or later she’d have left him as she did. Nearly five whole years they’d stuck it out—a goodish while in the buddy world, an eon or two for her. It was midnight on the beach, the moon was making hay. I’d stuffed my pockets with silver dollars and fireworks, and packets of musty Chiclets. The fine grey sand was dancing everywhere, across the dunes and slick opalescence where the water meets the shore. When at last I spied them in a hollow of grass, Lucille was bouncing like the bluest blue-movie girl the boys have ever seen. Doubtless neither had meant to hurt our friend. What were they, anyhow, but two sad dolts caught up in the malice of affairs? Lucille wasn’t as mean back then, either, not like she’d come to be. She was free from the fear of her corporate future, if in fact that’s what it had been. Nor did Basil ever hold ills, nothing genuine at least. He was a single child. He only knew to take what he saw. I never expected more. Still, they should’ve known better than to play with the clan. We’d pledged allegiance to it like a flag: Buddies forever, we’d promised, and we were solemn. But today things were different. I knew it. Dinky knew it, too. We all did. And now to prove it he was sprawled in a storm with his bottle, waiting for the guy that had just rolled up to save us.

First thing I noticed was the monkey—dead—dangling from the mirror on a string of beads. It could’ve been a fetus of hair, this thing, with pebbles for eyes and corn for teeth. The man that had hung it sat motionless behind the wheel, clad in weathered denim. He had sunken cheeks and hollow eyes and a silver beard to boot. I scratched my ear—his eyes traced my hand. I drummed my fingers—his eyes traced my hand. Klaus Kinski came to mind, as Herzog’s Nosferatu, and grunions filled my head, beneath a heavy moon. We were alone.

“That little flake,” said the man as he nodded to the monkey, “is called José.” He sucked a tooth and gestured to a crucifix he himself must have painted red. “Ronald, though, he’s not so bad as Fortinbras or him.” Tattooed across the fingers of one hand was the word BEND, across the other, GIVE. A cigarette twitched in the webbing there. Empties fouled the dash.

“We hit a bear,” I said.

Why I did I couldn’t say. We’d had an accident. What difference how? Maybe I feared any less a case for invading the old man’s turf—and sure as shit I had such a feeling, like I’d missed some glaring portent of doom, I didn’t know—would send him on a rampage. Or maybe it was just his creepy gaze.

“Who’s that?” he said. Dinky was still in the mud.

“He’s sick.”

“I see, I see, so that’s who he is.”

“Listen, mister, we need a ride bad.”

“You need something bad,” said the man. In slow order he tapped the Christ, the monkey, and the yellow dog beside him. “What do you fellows think R-E this crisis?” I stood waiting while he sucked his teeth some more and spit. “Throw him in,” he said with a jerk of his thumb to the rear.

“He’s sick,” I said.

“You hear that, Fortinbras?” he said to the dog.

I found no change in the geeze’s tone, but Fortinbras dropped from the window and appeared in the bed behind him. A spate of dolls in varied dismemberment lay about the beast, some missing heads, others arms or legs. The man shot me a look part fishy, part fatherly, his eyes running off two ways at once.

“You going to lay one, boy, or get off the pot?”

I wanted to be naked, to lie naked beneath a tender sun. I wanted the smell of a clean bright day, and heat, tart and dry. I wanted a heat that lasted, endless sand, visions of dazzle and grain. Why wouldn’t his eyes release me?… Lanterns, vultures, many things in hell… I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever… Madmen know nothing…

I got Dinky in the cab. The man took my hand. It was smooth and hard and cold as outer space.

“The name is Super.”

“Andrew,” I said. “That’s Dinky.”

“Pleased to rub truth with you boys.”

“We could use a doctor now, I think.”

Super gripped his wheel. “You do what you’ve done, you’ll get what you’ve got. Catch our drift?”

Dinky drew himself up to look at this strange man. “We hate doctors,” he said.

“Then which way you going?” I said.

“The only way that’s good,” Super said, “and that’s the way we come.”

“That is good,” Dinky said with a smile. “Because we sure do hate a doctor.”

BIRDFEED AND BULLETS, THE WEEPING BARK OF A million pines…

A freezer’s scent of the clinic and the morgue…

The gleam of a roadside can…

The road wound on, the road kept winding, and sound was a cat’s rough tongue…

Super’s face was constant motion—that silver beard, those leathery cheeks, tiny eyes that flitted and bounced…

He ranted and sang and whispered and howled, and he did it all with ease…

We’d been forsaken, more or less, adrift with the phantoms that were the old man’s words, loosed, it seemed, with each wave of his troubling hand…

At some point he set in about the doings in our cabin, inexplicable, he said, slippery, he said, though never exactly what…

I saw the lovebird, its gaping beak and eyes, I smelled ice cream and road kill and blood…

That familiar longing had returned, for my noons of summer, counting minnows in a jar and naming each breeze. What had happened to those days?

A meerschaum appeared in Super’s hand and then from the glove a bag of gnarly weed, but Dinky went on drooling. Super crammed the stuff in the pipe and with a nail snicked the match he’d somehow managed to keep…

He chortled and smiled, puffed and drove, happy is as happy can…

I took the pipe, he the bottle…

The road was thick with water and mud and stones from the crumbling earth. At every pothole my friend yipped like a dog asleep till at last he jerked to with eyes that could’ve been eggs. When Super gave him the pipe, I thought he’d start coughing, but instead his face melted with the smoke from his lips.

“I was going to ask where we were,” he said, “but now I don’t even care. Onward, Benson!”

“We are no man’s slave,” Super said, and jerked his thumb aft, referring, I supposed, to the bed of broken dolls. “If you care to differ, interrogate the rest.”

“I’m an army man, mister whatever-your-name-is,” Dinky said.

“The name, boy, is Super.”

“The way I said, Super,” said Dinky, and drew himself up, “I’m an army man. And the only thing I’m good for is knowing what makes the grass grow green.” He pointed at Super. “You know what makes the grass grow green?” he said. “Bright red blood.”

“See what you know after you’ve been wearing that grass for a hat a few years.”

“He’s not always like this,” I said.

Super let out a noise, maybe a chuckle, maybe not. “Oh, but you know he is,” he said. “He’s the marathon man. Catch our drift?”

“I am man!” Dinky shouted. “Hear me roar!”

In the distance a light appeared, I hadn’t seen it off to the west as we came in—who lived out there? I thought, there’s a light out there attached to nothing, it looked, a lonesome bulb in the trees—but then soon enough, like everything else, the question fell away, and when I looked up, we had reached our cabin.

The man turned his body and head in tandem. His mouth was an earwig, his eyes gleaming coins. “We’ll be sorry to see you go.”

“You don’t have to go,” Dinky said. “This is our place.” Super fixed his gaze on my pal and said no more. “But we’ve got booze,” Dinky said.

“We’re a free man, boys, and wish you alike.”

It must’ve been a good ten minutes we stood in the rain while Dinky worked to bring Super in, but the man evaded my friend until he had no choice but to turn away.

“There’s nothing you can take from me,” said Super when Dinky announced he’d take his leave, “but my life, but my life, but my life. Fortinbras!” he shouted at his dog. “It’s time to make the soldiers shoot!”

Fortinbras appeared in the cab with his nose out the window, and the truck sputtered on. The last thing I saw was a sticker on the bumper. I Have a Dream!

WE STOOD IN THE RAIN, WATCHING BASIL through the window, berserk with his cherished knife. The freak never left without it, plus some rope and his grandfather’s stupid hatchet, what, with the sack that held them, he called his man-bag. Every so often he’d mellow some, long enough to hypnotize whatever conjured fool had been dumb enough to block him. Then he spun off into the kicking, punching, and cutting he thought his moment of glory, the killing time. Well, the boob was dancing, and who could tell him otherwise?

Soundgarden was the band they’d picked to beat the ghosts. Hickory of course was what my eyes wanted, but they got Lucille—goddamn—snapping her fingers as she twirled. When finally Hickory did float up, Dinky fairly groaned. She was too lovely for her own good, it was true, and I was a fool in the rain.

“She’s so beautiful,” Dinky said.

“Lucy?” I said. “She’s all right.”

“Look at her,” Dinky said. “She moves like… smoke.”

“I don’t know about you, but I am freezing.”

Dinky wiped his nose. It could’ve been rotten fruit. “Basil won’t be happy about his truck,” he said. “He won’t be happy at all.”

My pal didn’t look so hot. In fact my pal looked downright fucked. “Basil,” I said, “can gargle my nut sack. Let’s go call you a doctor.”

“Who do we think we are, always telling us what to do?”

“We think we’re the guy who’s smarter than the moron we’re taking care of.”

“Where’s our bottle?”

“Milk’s all gone, Dink,” I said. “Diapers, too, in case you’re wondering.”

My friend glared like I’d stuck him with a shiv. “Have you ever chased a pig with a spear, AJ, then realized there was no pig?”

“What?” I said.

“Exactly,” he said, and walked up the stairs.

SOMEONE HAD SET OUT THE CASE OF OLD CROW we’d brought, and the liter of Safeway coca-cola, all in a row with five new glasses. The rest lay spread across the table—CDs, lighters, bottle caps, shades, smoke packs empty and full, a half-munched bag of Chips Ahoy and a full one of Doritos, gum wrappers, peanut shells, matches, gum. Basil still had the knife, but now he had a bottle, too, stuck in his hole, what else. I thought he’d drain the thing for sure, but somehow he found the grace to pull up short and squirt an arc of whiskey through his teeth. Maybe fifteen bottles and cans lay about him, Lucky Lager, this round, with rebuses in their caps.

Hickory pointed at us the way children point at people who are fat. “They’re here,” she said.

Lucille ran outside, looking, I guessed, for the ice we’d never got.

“Some rabbits ran across the road,” I said, and listened to the phone hum like a seashell at my ear.

“Where’s my truck?” Basil said, moving in.

He did this sort of thing a lot, most recently to some pencil-necked kid at Radio Shack. At first the kid had given Basil hell for a mike cord he wanted to return. By the time we left, he’d freaked the kid so bad he had both his cord and a gift card worth ten bucks.

“We had an accident,” Dinky said.

“An accident,” Hickory said.

“This phone’s shit the bed,” I told them. “Is there another?”

Lucille, wet once again, had balled herself up in a chair by the hearth. Poor girl. The world wouldn’t reckon like she’d been told.

“You blockheads,” she said with tears in her eyes. “You’re all a pack of blockheads.” Dinky’s nose was crusty with blood and snot. Anyone else would’ve been horrified just to see him. But these people, they didn’t say a word. “All I wanted,” Lucille said, “was a bag of ice.”

Part of me had a craving to smack Lucille. Instead I knelt down before her. “Pretty often,” I said, “it’s hard to tell the difference between what hurts and what doesn’t.”

“I’m a sellout,” she said. “A crappy, lousy sellout.”

“I don’t know about all that,” Basil said. “I mean, you’re just doing what you got to do.”

“What would you know about it?”

“I work.”

“At staying drunk you do. At schmoozing you do.”

“Lucy,” I said.

“You’re wasting your time, AJ,” Basil said. “Nothing you can do when she gets like this.”

Lucille took up the National Enquirer at her feet and began to shred it. “How would you like to go around calling yourself, AJH vanden Heuvel, failed painter? AJH vanden Heuvel, CreditCom’s newest Junior Project Analyst?”

“No one said you can’t still do your thing,” I said.

“Oh, joy. Yes, I’ll give china-painting lessons Sunday afternoons. That’ll do it.”

I put a hand on her leg. “Have a beer,” I said.

“I know what I am,” she said. “It’s just that I can’t seem to help myself.”

“People only think they know what they are.”

“Yeah, well, I may not know all that, but what I think I know is that I’m a bitch.”

“You hear that?” Basil said. “Mark that shit down.”

“What I want to know,” Lucille said, “is how life ever got to be so lovely and sweet.”

The dead bird, its horrible stink, I couldn’t get away…

I looked over my shoulder, and what should I see but two eyes staring from this poster, a cowgirl circa ’75, with her fringed suede vest and denim blouse round the tits of the poster girl she was. She’d perked herself up against a pair of skis to smile toward the bedroom her smile let you know you’d soon be in… And now a shade’s old song gamboled through my head, a poem I’d written way, way back, the worst… a thousand wintry heaves ache beneath the sky… stop the whisper, recall the spring… when your shadow nears my blood, i sleep…

“He needs a doctor,” I said.

“Is he sick?” Lucille said.

“Is he sick.”

“Are you sick, Dinky?” said Hickory. She’d got down beside him now and was stroking his arm.

“Look at him,” I said. “I mean, Christ, you know?”

Basil drained a beer and flung the can. “Let’s everybody look at poor Dinky.” He wrinkled up his face and extended his hands like an impresario weary of his freak. “You’d think he’s miserable. But the thing is, he likes it when crap goes sour.”

“Are you actually putting effort into being such a dick?” Hickory said.

“All this attention he gets?” Basil said. “He’s as happy as white on rice.”

The tube meantime had been feeding us steady ruin—houses mired in water and mud; trees on roads; children clutching elders; stern-faced men, spent-faced men, some with slickers, others dusters, hauling sandbags and chattel; stranded vehicles and collapsing bridges; creatures mad with terror…

“AJ, baby,” Basil said. “Bosom buddy. Please. Where the hell’s my truck?”

“There was this rabbit,” I said. “A guy gave us a ride.”

“And who, pray tell, might that be?” Hickory said.

I told them about Super and his monkey. I told them about Fortinbras, and the little red Christ, and the truck of mangled dolls. Dinky stood up and shouted. He said how nervous we’d got when Super claimed to read our thoughts, how the geeze had ranted on about eagles and atomizers, the reversal of poles and the rest. Hickory asked if he was a shrink.

“He gave us drugs,” Dinky said.

That got them frisky, all right.

“I’ll tell you guys what,” Basil said. “Maybe—and I mean just maybe—if you two morons get me really fucking baked, I’ll forget you wrecked my truck.”

I hadn’t thought to query the old man whether he kept a stash for times he ran across dorks in the rain at night. That’s what I said.

“So what was his name, then?” said Lucille.

“This you’re not going to believe.”

“Like I didn’t already stop believing anything you say ten years back.”

“He said it was Stuyvesant Something Something. Yeah. But he told us to call him Super.”

Lucille said, “Next you’ll be telling us he put a gun to your head and banged you in the heiny.”

“Banged them in the ear, more like it,” Basil said. “Knocked what was left of their rocks clean out.”

Hickory said, “But wouldn’t it be a marvel if he and Dinky were blood?”

Basil was pacing. “What are we going to do about my truck?” He poked Dinky’s arm. “Cause in case you guys didn’t know, good old shit for brains here was right for once in his life. The weatherman says it’s going to flood like hell.”

“Limo Wreck” became “The Day I Tried to Live.” We gaped speechless at the phone till Hickory’s sigh confirmed the real.

“We’re stuck,” she said.

Basil took up his knife. For a long time he gave us his back, running a thumb down the blade, but then he spun round and flung the thing at a pile of wood.

“You two morons are so lucky,” he said after his knife had clattered to the floor. “I should skin you both, right here and now.”

“You’re lucky Granddad isn’t here to skin you,” Dinky said. “Granddad wouldn’t like the way you’re treating his place.”

Lucille’s face looked suddenly very stupid, like some girl about to get killed in a flick. “Did you hear that?” she said. No one said a word. “It was a voice,” she said. “Like some horrible singing.”

“You might remember, kids,” Basil said, “there’s something out there called a storm?”

“Sometimes, squeeze,” Lucille said, “I think about what a bummer it is I’m not a man. I’d fuck you so hard you’d never—”

Subtle though it was, the sound repeated, just as Lucille had said, like some horrible singing. She went to the window—followed by me and Hickory and Basil with his hatchet—and moved from it to the next.

“Maybe it was a bear,” she said after we’d covered the place for nothing.

Again Basil turned on her. “That’s about as retarded as when you didn’t know what a belly button is.” This was true. At a lobster joint north of Ensenada, Lucille had downed a pitcher of booze and claimed belly buttons the stuff of shots at birth.

“Bears hibernate, Lucille,” Dinky said.

“Yeah, well,” Lucille said, grimacing at Basil, “at least I don’t have a dick that hooks off thirty degrees right.” She brushed a lock of hair from her face. “Fucking banana dick.”

Now this was something not even I had ever heard. In all the time I’d known Basil, he’d never mentioned a faulty unit. “You’re kidding,” I said.

We all turned to the giant and watched his face screw up. He began to stutter, but that didn’t work either, so he poured himself a drink.

“Anyway,” he said, “there’s nothing out there.”

“There’s nothing out there now,” Hickory said.

“Who’s your closest neighbor?” I said.

“We don’t have neighbors,” Dinky said. “We’ve got fences.”

“Turn out the lights,” I said.

“Fuck you,” Basil said.

“So we can see what’s out there.”

Again we peered out the window, looking for shapes, a car, a ghost, whatever, but found the same old rain and trees in the same old howling night, the same uncanny sense of possibilities imminent.

“The wind can do some batty shit,” Basil said, and raised his glass in a toast. “Here’s to Buddy Time.”

Hickory stood close against me, jungle sweet, the smell of her strong, cucumber and vanilla. Her hand covered mine, she smiled, my hand was in hers, my hand was in her hand. I wanted to eat her teeth, then. I wanted to climb inside her, tired and full, and fall into precious sleep.

“Days like this,” she said, “they say damn the water and burn the wine.”

“Sounds to us,” Dinky said, “a bit like that seize the day crap everyone’s been spouting.”

Lucille picked up Fear and Loathing. “‘We had two bags of grass,’ she said, reading from the cover, ‘seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls.’ Is that cool or what?” she said, and tossed the book down.

“Everyone knows Hunter S is our hero,” Dinky said. “His work with the Hell’s Angels was nothing short of revolutionary.”

“Now that,” Basil said, “I’ll give you.”

“They even put a contract out on him for it. Who’s that Indian fellow, Rushdie or whoever the heck?” Dinky turned away to cough. “Excuse us,” he said, wiping his mouth with an arm. “The guy the Ayatollah wants offed? An ant. A literary microbe squirming in the shadow of the god.” He shuffled over and held out the book like the Bible itself. “‘He who makes a beast of himself,’ he said, quoting from the epigraph, ‘gets rid of the pain of being a man.’” He took a moment to stare us down. “Hunter S,” he said, “showed us all who we really are.”

“I got to give it to you one more time, Dink,” Basil said, slapping him on the back. “You poor fuckless fart.”

“Hey you guys,” Hickory said. “Guess what?”

“What?” Basil said.

“Lick my butt!” Hickory said, and burst out laughing. She was whacking on her knee like some old gal from Arkansas. “No, but seriously. Anybody here ever play Truth or Dare?”

“We won’t play,” Dinky said, “but we’ll sure watch.” He beamed at Hickory and made an effort to grin. “We like to watch.”

Hickory led Lucille to the center of the room and plopped down on the floor. “Come along now, Basil darling,” she said. “We’re dying to know your secrets.”

Basil scratched his balls. “I like a good dare every now and then. Keeps me on my toes.”

“Bring the hooch,” I said, “and whatever else.”

“Perchance we could change the music?” Hickory said. “And that abominable machine as well,” she said, indicating the TV. “Please.”

“‘4th of July,’” Basil said, “is one of the great all-timers.”

“Try the Jelly Roll Morton.”

Some talk went round how the old master thought a Haitian witch had cursed him. Dinky, back on the couch, said that in the end Jelly Roll had taken to acting like Howard Hughes.

“The guy never ventured out,” he said. “And nobody cursed him, either. He’d simply trapped himself in his own little cage of fear. At least that’s our view. For what it’s worth.”

“Break out the Jelly Roll, squeeze!”

“Damn it, woman,” Basil said. “How many times do I have to tell you not to call me that in public?”

Lucille squinted. “This is public?”

WE’D MET HICKORY AT A PARTY IN THE CITY. TO get inside, you had to take an ancient lift, the kind with a platform behind a metal door that wouldn’t budge without a couple of trolls to heave on some old chain. They even had a bellhop, in a red-velvet monkey suit and pillbox hat with a strap. For eyebrows the kid had little steel barbells, five or six per side, and for teeth real fangs, straight-up Lestat. And if that weren’t enough, he was running Maori-style ink on his chin, and every patch of his face but that was goofy with shiny dust.

Before us lay a massive room, probably two- or three-hundred yards long and half as wide, chockful with every type of gork in the book. Guys with bunless chaps ran around the place smacking each other with crops. Chicks, too, more than half of them decked out like Catwoman, scampered about with nipple clamps and whips and chains, wreaking all manner of hell. There were go-go dancers in bubbles and cages, Rastafaris, homeboys, deathrockers and mods, rockabilly kids, swingers and punks, not to mention your basic Haight Street hipsters. Jumbotrons swayed from the ceilings flashing clever retromercials, and thrift-store TVs lined the walls fuzzy with chickens in the slaughterhouse and Japanimation and big-time sex acts, the whole of it swamped in banks of chemical fog. Some heavy-duty industrial house provided the coup de grâce for this late-night get down, pumping so hard you could feel it from the marrow in your bones to the depths of your aching nards. The four of us snagged some drinks and split, the two traitors one way, Dinky and I the next.

We stumbled on our girl in some sort of cave, everyone but her stupid with dope. In her tight corduroys and glittering boots, she sat among thirty or forty crackpot fiends sucking fingers, faces, toes, whatever their mouths could hold. But what stung most was the guy beside her, an image to the T of my old toad in a picture I’d seen when he was a Hare Krishna. He had fierce blue eyes and a queue from his head, all the way down his back. He was even wearing bamboo thongs. Soon, however, he slipped off, and I forgot him and was glad. Jerks by the droves kept trying to get their paws on Hickory, but she sat among them cool as a queen, there, as she’d said, “to take in all the footage.” We never asked her name, and she never said. It was Dinky laid the moniker down. “You look like a Hickory girl if ever we’ve seen one,” he told her, to which she said, “Hickory dickory dock, the mouse ran up the clock.” All the while her face lay before us unreadable as Chinese kanji. I remember staring at her for a preposterously long time, asking myself just who in hell this willow was, with the ovate eyes and strong white teeth, and me like a doofus trying to smile.

So I’d known what I wanted before the game had begun. The problem was, having so much to want, I had to choose.

“What’s your name?” I said. “Your real name.”

No one but Dinky would’ve expected that. Neither Basil nor Lucille had ever known Hickory wasn’t Hickory. The day we introduced her, it was Hickory, meet Basil and Lucille. Their faces didn’t quite know what to do.

“I’ve always wondered,” Hickory said, “why none of you have asked.”

“It can’t be more fucked up than Hickory,” Basil said.

“Elmira Pugsley?” Hickory said.

“It’s different,” Lucille said. “That’s for sure.”

“It’s after my granny. But since the point here’s to be totally honest—and I’m a totally honest gal—the full name’s Elmira Beatrice Pugsley.”

Basil clicked his tongue. “Poor, poor girl,” he said.

“No wonder you go around letting everyone call you Hickory,” Lucille said.

Dinky burbled from the couch. “We don’t think that’s very nice, now do we?”

“Who asked you to wake up, hey moron?” Basil said.

“The middle name,” Hickory went on, “that was my father’s doing. They were farmer hippies.”

“You,” I said, “come from hippies?”

Hickory smiled. “I spent the first ten years of my life on a commune up in Oregon. We had beehives and everything. Organic bees. Organic everything.”

“Poor, poor girl,” Basil said.

Hickory put her chin in her palm and looked us over. When she stopped at me I knew what she wanted, but then she passed to Basil. “You, tough guy. Which will it be?”

“Toss a mop on the floor,” I said at Basil’s show of squirming. “See which way it flops.”

Even as I said this it struck me just how much we didn’t care what Basil did. We knew—or at least I knew, or thought I knew—that either way he turned wouldn’t change a thing. How could he choose when he had no choice, the difference between a Truth or Dare having collapsed beneath their emptiness? For Basil, to be honest meant to be daring. And however strangely, however sadly, daring was as close as Basil ever got to truth. The notions had become two mirrors reflecting only themselves.

“Goddamn it,” Basil said. “Shit. Truth.”

“Oh dear yes, quite lovely indeed,” Hickory said in this high-society debutante voice. “Now. What’s the most shameful thing you’ve ever done—sexually, I mean?” Basil looked blank, so Hickory said, “Of course I mean shameful in the traditional sense, the suburban sense.”

“I can tell you that,” Lucille said. “It happened only last week, when he greased me up like a Thanksgiving turkey and tried to—”

“I already heard that story,” I said. Lucille turned with gaping eyes. “He told me everything,” I said.

“Everything?” she said.

Basil cleared his throat. “When I was a kid,” he said, “I had a stuffed monkey.”

“How old are we talking?” Hickory said.

“Twelve or thirteen, I guess. My dad had given it to me before he took off. Anyways, it had this hole in its crotch. It started out little, but kept getting bigger.” Basil had been slouching forward as he talked. Now he planted his hands on the floor, as if the telling were over.

“What kind of story is that?” I said.

Basil’s face was flushing now. “There’s more,” he said.

“Come, come,” Hickory said.

“One day I was in the closet.”

“Yes?”

“With the monkey.”

“Yes?”

“And I was looking at pornos, you know, and, I don’t know, there it was.” Here Basil paused with great melodrama, worse than a creep on the tube.

“Out with it!” I shouted.

“So I fucked it.”

“Really?” Lucille said, her face lit up.

“That’s not all,” Basil said.

“There’s more,” I said. “There’s always more with this guy.”

“See, when I finished, I wanted to hide the bastard, but I couldn’t think of any place where my ma wouldn’t find it. There was also another lady and her kid living with us in this house. You can see why I had to destroy the facts. So I got out a big old garbage bag, one of those super heavy-duty Glad bags, and stuffed the monkey in there. Then I jumped on my moped and drove out to the mall. They had all those dumpsters in the alley behind the Mervyns there. Thing is, I didn’t just chuck it in there. I buried it. Dug through old tampons and shit, and chicken bones and diapers and soup cans, all that repugnant shit, and crammed that little fucker down at the very, very bottom, and then I covered it all back up.”

“You interred it,” Hickory said. “As in a mausoleum.” Now she circled our faces with a look that said I’m going to tell you all what this really means. “Some people would say that was very symbolic.”

“Not this again,” Lucille said.

“I fucked a stuffed monkey,” Basil said. “Big deal.”

“First of all,” Hickory said, “it wasn’t just any old monkey. It was the monkey your father gave you before he abandoned you. That’s why you killed the monkey. You fucked it, as you say. And then, because you couldn’t live with the guilt, you buried it someplace where no one would ever find it.”

“You,” Basil said, “are a goddamned fruit loop.”

“Check out the science,” Hickory said.

“Ha!” Lucille said.

“Seriously,” Hickory said. “I’m not surprised in the least. It was a very normal thing to do for a boy that age. Especially in our culture. He just did it in an abnormal way.”

Dinky rolled up on an elbow and scratched his chest. “You know what Hermann Goering said about our culture? He said, ‘When I hear anyone speak of culture, I reach for my revolver.’”

“You’re the one belongs in the loony bin,” I told Basil. He had a big whitehead on his nose I’d just noticed. “I’ll bet you even crammed that thing full of mayonnaise before you did it.”

“It’s all right, baby,” Lucille said, rubbing his back. “I still love you.”

“We think we’ll be going upstairs now,” Dinky said. “We’re going to lie down for a while.” He stood there in his Cal Bears rugby shirt and Joe Boxer boxers with their bologna-sandwich appliqués. Then he sniffled and wiped his nose and started away, dragging his feet like they were a couple of sleds. “We don’t suppose any of you would care to tuck us in?”

“I’d love to oblige,” Lucille said, “but I know how you get when a bed’s nearby.”

“Not that I’d worry so much about that,” Basil said. His face was waxy now, a veneer of cosmopolite ugly. “He ain’t exactly what I’d call, you know, at the height of his form these days.”

Dinky picked his nose. Then, his face a model of serenity, he extended his arm and with a simple motion of thumb and finger flicked the booger onto Basil’s hat. “At least our dick is straight,” he said, looking at Lucille.

“That thing better not have landed on me,” Basil said. “I’ll cut that straight dick off. Go ahead,” he said, “go to sleep. But beware.”

“I knew a guy,” I said, “who woke up one morning and went to take a pee, and when he pulled his dick out, guess what color it was?”

“You guys are so sick,” Hickory said. “I’m trapped in a shack with a grade-A bunch of sickos.”

“Black,” I said. “As your crappy gaping pupils, I’m talking.”

“In fact, to call you nothing but sickos is a kindness you scarcely deserve.”

“Turns out,” I said, “the guy had got so blotto he didn’t even know his frat buddy’d taken the thing out in the middle of the night and colored it with a Magic Marker, one of those big-ass felt-tipped Magic Markers with the refillable cartridges even.”

“I find a booger on me,” Basil said, “I’ll cut his dick off.”

“Come on, Dinky,” Hickory said. “You go lie down, and I’ll make you some tea.”

Dinky left. We could hear him shuffling up the stairs and across the floor above. No one said anything to Basil about the booger on his hat. We just poured more drinks.

“Sometimes,” Basil said, “I think, Man, that guy’s got no spine at all.”

“Character,” Lucille said. “He’s got no character.”

“No, I mean spine. Character’d be what you are. And you’re only what you are when the lights go down.”

“The guy’s been a year in Bosnia,” I said. “Sleeping in two feet of mud. Eating Ball Park Franks and Twinkies and shit.”

“We all know he didn’t go over there because he’s a patriot.”

“If you were into ninety grand of debt,” I said, “and didn’t have a way to pay it off, you’d’ve joined the army, too.”

“Dinky joined the army because it’s not the real world. Like everything else he does. To keep from doing anything real, I mean. Like a real job. Like a career.”

Hickory snorted. “What, and you call driving around HelLA a couple hours a day a career? You call that a job even, chucking papers on the curb?”

“He wouldn’t even do that,” I said, “if he didn’t feel so guilty for a life’s worth of mooching off his sugar units.”

“Bitch,” said Basil. “I’m a professional musician.”

“You’re a record company’s bagboy.”

“I’m the mother fucking mover and shaker who’s going to make your ass pay, is what I am. And guess what else? It’s only a matter of time.”

“You’re thirty-five years old, Basil. You know as well as those record people do the kiddies won’t be lining up to see your teeth fall out. Not to mention you could stop kicking everybody out of your band all the time.”

“So I’ll be fat and bald and toothless, but at least I’ll be up there. Sure as hell beats chasing pubes for a living.”

“That’s not even cool.”

“You want to be cool, be cool.”

“Look, you boobs,” Lucille said, “are we still playing or what?”

There was that briefest moment of doubt where Basil and I considered exchanging our knives for guns or throwing the knives away. But really the doubt was feigned. We knew what would happen. The kill was just a dream. The sight of blood was enough. We were only after the blood. This of course was a perversion cultivated over time, like a taste for taboo food, monkey brain or mice. The satisfaction of knowing we’d wounded one another was more than sufficient. In fact, it had become for us a fix of sorts, why our hate for one another always equaled our need. Basil and I were Siamese twins parted only in flesh.

“Hell yes, we are,” he said, “and it’s still my turn.”

“Your turn?” Hickory said.

“To ask.”

Lucille tossed back a shot. “Well ask away then,” she said. “Ask away the doo-da day.”