“Could I talk to you alone for a minute, Ruby?” Stein said, feeling their silent laughter as he said it.
“Oh, Barry....”
“Please...”
She let him drag her out into the hall while he stewed in the gall of Sargent’s smug easiness about it.
“What are you doing to me?” he rasped. “Are you going to stay here and ball that savage? It’s not safe here. You’ve seen what this place is like. What Sargent is like.”
“Just because we’ve balled doesn’t mean you own me,” Ruby said. “I’m not buying any male chauvinist ego trips from you or anybody else. I told you that. I ball who I want when I want.”
“You’re going to ball him just to make a point! Just to show me something.”
“You’re ego tripping. Sargent interests me. He turns me on. Besides, don’t you think we should have someone close to him, someone he won’t hold at arm’s length?”
“Now who’s ego tripping, Mata Hari?”
“Look, I’m going to do it, Barry, and you’re not going to talk me out of it. But that doesn’t have to take anything away from you and me.”
“What?”
“Why should it?” she said innocently. She’s really serious, Stein realized. She had no concept of what she did to me in there, what she’s going to do, what a castration number she’s running. She really doesn’t understand.
“Why should it?”
he said. “Don’t you see how you’re humiliating me? Was
that
necessary to maintain your independence?”
Ruby’s face became unhappy, rueful. “No, it wasn’t,” she said. “I was wrong. I’m sorry. I’ll make it better.”
“How do you think you’re going to make a thing like that better?”
She laughed. “I’ll have myself driven to your house tomorrow morning,” she said smugly. “That should even up the old male ego contest, shouldn’t it?” She kissed him ironically, turned, waved, and disappeared back into Sargent’s room.
The hell of it was that she was right.
Bellows stubbed out the roach of his joint, got up, stretched, and said, “Think I’ll turn in.”
Coleman stole a glance at Sargent, who cocked his eyebrows back. “Yeah, me too.”
They left together, leaving Sargent sitting on a folding chair and Ruby Berger sitting on the cot. Sargent looked across the room at her, and she looked back, hard and unblinking, like a man.
You’re one tough little chick, he thought. After Stein crawled off the ranch, he had taken her on a quick tour of the place—the pistol range, the obstacle course, the armory, the kitchen, the motor pool. At each stop, he had given her some little rap, and she had impressed him with a hard eye for what was going on.
She understood immediately that the wire fences and metal frameworks of the obstacle course were designed to simulate the only physical barriers there would be at Sunset City. She didn’t have to have the armor plating inside the fleet of grubby-looking Volkswagen buses pointed out to her, and her ears pricked up knowingly when he revved one of the engines and it sounded like a Porsche.
And when he showed her the armory, she had some uncomfortable questions.
“You’ve got only a dozen of those military rifles your friends are carrying, Chris,” she said, peering into the locked shed at the rack of spare M-16’s, the boxes of cheap .38 caliber pistols, the ammo and the grenades. “Aren’t you going to give them to everybody?”
“Do I look that crazy? To give unreliable troops more firepower than the men I trust?”
“You said you trusted your people, Chris,” she said in a wounded tone of voice. “You said you understood them.”
“I said I could control them because I understand them, and one of the things I understand is that I can’t trust them with M-16’s. Saturday night specials will be dicey enough.”
“But you’ve got cases and cases of grenades in there. If you don’t trust them with rifles, how can you trust them with those?”
“Those are training grenades,” Sargent said. “They look like killer-dillers, and they make a lot of noise; but they don’t do very much.” He didn’t bother to tell her about the combat types the Boys would be carrying, just in case.
“It sounds like you don’t really expect them to be effective. It looks like you don’t even care.”
“They’ll be effective. They’ll perform their part of the mission, which will be strictly diversionary. The Boys and I will take the stage; we’re the only ones who may run into a reason for having effective weapons.”
“You say that so casually,” she said, and Sargent could not quite tell whether that was admiration or something else in her eyes. She was playing it close to the vest, she was being a member of the Revolutionary Action Committee.
Well, this isn’t the Revolutionary Action Committee now, baby, Sargent thought, getting up from his chair and sitting down next to her on the cot, which seemed only natural now that they were the only two people in the room.
“Well, what do you think of the operation, Ruby?” he said “It’s like you—very heavy high-energy stuff, but also a little tricky.”
“Do I seem tricky to you?” The thought pleased him.
“Aren’t you being tricky right now?”
“What do you mean by that?”
Her eyes laughed at him. “Well, I mean, here you are in the opening act of your big seduction number, right?”
“
Huh?”
Sargent grunted.
“You sit down next to me, and then you creep a little closer, then you brush your arm against me, and the conversation starts to change, and then....”
Sargent looked at her with narrower eyes. “You are weird,” he said. She suddenly made him feel he was involved in some crazy game with her, had been all day. When Stein went and she stayed, it had been obvious that she meant to ball him. Obvious to both of them. Since then, she had been pretending that she didn’t know it, and he had been going along because that’s how chicks are, that’s their dumb little game. But this stuff she was handing out now was a new one on him, a real ballbuster.
“I’m just being honest,” she said. “Why not be honest with me?”
“I’m not being honest with you, but you’re being honest with me, right?
I’m
playing games, but you’re not playing games?”
“All right,” she said, “let’s both be honest from here on in.” She placed the palms of her hands on his upper thighs. “I’ll start by telling you that at the end of this conversation, I’m going to fuck you. Fair enough? Now you don’t have to run any numbers on me, we can talk to each other like two human beings. After that, we’ll have a good fuck together, and tomorrow morning you’ll have me driven to Barry Stein’s house so he won’t be too uptight. After that... well, we’ll see. Isn’t that honest enough?”
Sargent’s head felt like it had been too close to a concussion grenade. He felt as if someone was trying to tie Boy Scout knots in his brain. Where was this chick coming at him from? How could she manage to tell him she was going to fuck him, which was where everything had been at all day, and manage to turn him off with it? What kind of number is she running on Barry Stein? What kind of number does she think she’s going to run on me? Well, I ain’t Barry Stein, lady.
“What if I don’t want to ball you?” he said. “You gonna rape me?”
“I might.”
“I think you would if you could,” he said.
“Wouldn’t you?”
“The difference is I could, lady,” Sargent said.
She glared at him; anger and lust seemed to be crossed somewhere inside her. Suddenly she was starting to turn him on again. “You think you could,” she said.
“I know I could.”
“Wanna bet?”
“Yeah, I’ll bet with you,” he said. “In fact, you just bet your ass.” And he lunged for her, grinning.
“You fucker
,
what do you think you’re doing
!” she screamed, and as his arms went around her shoulders, she socked him in the gut, half knocking the wind out of him. Reflexively, he aimed a backhand slap at her head. She caught his wrist in midair and hung on long enough to deflect the blow before he could rip his hand free.
“Goddamn it the hell!” Sargent grunted, grabbing both her wrists, pinning and spread eagling her across the cot below him. He pressed his mouth down on her lips and forced them open, but he was leery of thrusting his tongue inside. She tried with all her strength to push him off, and it took a lot of muscle to hold her.
At the same time, she tenderly put her tongue inside his mouth, rolling it around in languid thrust. The shock of pleasure made Sargent’s muscles relax for a moment, and she suddenly rolled him off her, off the cot, and onto the wooden floor. He landed on his shoulder with a bruising bump, and she landed on top of him.
She was still kissing him.
And she was unbuckling his pants. He let her slide his pants off, and then he rolled her under him, undoing her jeans, thrusting his two hands inside the waistband and pulling them down to her knees. Her arms free, she flipped him off her onto his back again. He went sprawling with her jeans in his grip, hobbling her at the ankles.
She wriggled out of the pants and leaped on top of him. She straddled him, and she grabbed him, and before he knew it, she was balling him, sitting atop him with her head held high and her face reddened and distorted.
“See how it feels!” she snarled, working her pelvis down and around in hard grinding strokes that sent lighting bolts of pleasure through his loins. Then more softly, achingly: “See how it feels.”
“See how this feels!” Sargent grunted, rolling her over and giving her a good hard pounding. She lifted herself into every thrust, pushing against him, fighting him, turning him to fire.
He moaned in ecstasy, and the strength of him went out into pleasure. In that moment, Ruby flipped him onto his back again and, with a few hard strokes, blew him out. With her on top.
When his eyes opened, she was squatting across him, her hair a tangled mess, her face sweaty and dirty, grinning smugly, her eyes bright with some weird mixture of pleasure and triumph.
“You lose,” she said.
“Maybe I’ll win next time.”
“You’re not mad?”
Sargent laughed. He found himself liking her. He found himself thinking that had been one nice fuck. “I can think of worse ways of losing,” he said. “Besides, it was a fair fight.”
She leaned down and kissed him softly. “I like you,” she said. “In a funny kind of way, I like the way you treat me. I don’t feel put down.”
“I think we understand each other,” Sargent said.
“Maybe we do. But to make sure, maybe we should go through it once more. A little easier, this time. Now that we understand each other.”
He rolled her over, and this time she didn’t resist, and neither did he, and they tumbled each other round the floor like bears.
The whole world is on fire, Lord
Passing through the flame
We are sons of fire, children
Dancing in the flame....
Bill Horvath picked out the basic line on his guitar while Susan sang the words off the paper he had written them on. Bobby, Jerry, and Mark tapped their feet in time to the music they were hearing for the first time, and their eyes told Horvath what he already knew: that “Passing Through the Flame,” the song he had written to fill the final hole in the album was probably going to be the hit of the album.
We live and die in agony
Dancing in the flame
We live and love in ecstasy
Dancing in the flame....
Out side in the canyon darkness, a dog howled, an engine sputtered, and the stars shone down weakly in a warm misty night. The breeze blowing into the living room through the open sun deck doors was rich with bougainvillaea sweetness and rasty with the bite of late-summer LA smog. Susan sang the words in a clear, strong voice that was too thin for the song without any strong instrumental backing, but Horvath could see Bobby putting organ to it in his mind and Jerry tapping out rhythm on his knees with his fingers.
For each of us is destiny
Passing through the flame
And each of us is ecstasy
Laughing in the rain.
Dancing in the flame
Passing through the flame
Dancing in the flame....
Susan let the song die out into whisper, then clapped her hands in delight. “I love it,” she said.
“A real winner.”
“Best thing on the album.”
Horvath sat back in his favorite beanbag chair and let the good vibes roll over him. Sweetest of all, the song was a new direction; it was no exploitation of the image of Star, and yet it was still somehow Velvet Cloud material. Maybe we’re really out of the trap. Maybe that son of a bitch Jango’s been right all along. Horvath found himself loving and hating Jango Beck at the same time, a feeling straight out of the good old days in San Francisco, when Jango was riding and prodding them to the top. That golden time when their strange triangular machinery was rolling along in high karmic gear.
Maybe we’re moving again; maybe we’re tapping our real energy sources. And maybe we don’t know what they are. And maybe Jango really does, after all. Maybe we should trust him.
“You look like you’re solving the riddle of the universe, Bill,” Bobby said. “Want to let us in on it?”
Horvath laughed. “I was trying to decide whether we should really trust Jango Beck.”
“That’s the riddle of the universe, all right.”
“Man, that ain’t no riddle; that is a
dumb
question.”
“What did you decide?” Bobby asked dryly.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Horvath said. “I don’t even believe myself.”
Mark took out a joint, lit it, dragged, passed it to Jerry. “A lot of people are going to be trusting Jango Beck two days from now,” he said. “Over a quarter of a million of of them.”
“The thought,” said Bobby, “is mind-boggling.”
“Here,” Jerry said, handing Bobby the joint. “Get your mind a little boggled beforehand.”
“Someone’s coming,” Susan said.
She had been sitting on the edge of a low table looking out the open sun deck doors across the dark-on-dark-under-dark of the canyon at the jeweled lights of the city at the foot of the hills. She hadn’t been listening to the conversation, and now that she had called his attention to it, Horvath heard a small motor straining up the drive. A Volkswagen or a Datsun or a Toyota.