“I’m glad,” she said, and she looked glad. “But what will you do now?”
“I really don’t know.”
She said: “I think that’s sad.”
“Is it?” he asked. It was a real question.
They were in the car again, driving Route 7 toward Landy. The traffic near the city was stop and go. People were on their way to work. When they passed the construction on the 784 extension, the day’s operation was already cranking up. Men in yellow hi-impact plastic construction hats and green rubber boots were climbing into their machines, frozen breath pluming from their mouths. The engine of one of the orange city payloaders cranked, cranked, kicked over with a coughing mortar-explosion sound, cranked again, then roared into a choppy idle. The driver gunned it in irregular bursts like the sound of warfare.
“From up here they look like little boys playing trucks in a sandpile,” she said.
Outside the city, traffic smoothed out. She had taken the two hundred dollars with neither embarrassment nor reluctance—with no special eagerness, either. She had slit a small section of the CPO coat’s lining, had put the bills inside, and had then sewed the slit back up with a needle and some blue thread from Mary’s sewing box. She had refused his offer of a ride to the bus station, saying the money would last longer if she went on hitching.
“So what’s a nice girl like you doing in a car like this?” he asked.
“Humh?” She looked at him, bumped out of her own thoughts.
He smiled. “Why you? Why Las Vegas? You’re living in the margins same as me. Give me some background.”
She shrugged. “There isn’t much. I was going to college at the University of New Hampshire, in Durham. That’s near Portsmouth. I was a junior this year. Living off campus. With a guy. We got into a heavy drug thing.”
“You mean like heroin?”
She laughed merrily. “No, I’ve never known anyone who did heroin. Us nice middle-class druggies stick to the hallucinogens. Lysergic acid. Mescaline. Peyote a couple of times, STP a couple of times. Chemicals. I did sixteen or eighteen trips between September and November.”
“What’s it like?” he asked.
“Do you mean, did I have any ‘bad trips’?”
“No, I didn’t mean that at all,” he said defensively.
“There were some bad trips, but they all had good parts. And a lot of the good trips had bad parts. Once I decided I had leukemia. That was scary. But mostly they were just strange. I never saw God. I never wanted to commit suicide. I never tried to kill anyone.”
She thought that over for a minute. “Everybody has hyped the shit out of those chemicals. The straights, people like Art Linkletter, say they’ll kill you. The freaks say they’ll open all the doors you need to open. Like you can find a tunnel into the middle of yourself, as if your soul was like the treasure in an H. Rider Haggard novel. Have you ever read him?”
“I read She when I was a kid. Didn’t he write that?”
“Yes. Do you think your soul is like an emerald in the middle of an idol’s forehead?”
“I never thought about it.”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I’ll tell you the best and the worst that ever happened to me on chemicals. The best was topping out in the apartment one time and watching the wallpaper. There were all these little round dots on the wallpaper and they turned into snow for me. I sat in the living room and watched a snowstorm on the wall for better than an hour. And after a while, I saw this little girl trudging through the snow. She had a kerchief on her head, a very rough material like burlap, and she was holding it like this—” She made a fist under her chin. “I decided she was going home, and bang! I saw a whole street in there, all covered with snow. She went up the street and then up a walk and into a house. That was the best. Sitting in the apartment and watching wallovision. Except Jeff called it headovision.”
“Was Jeff the guy you were living with?”
“Yes. The worst trip was one time I decided to plunge out the sink. I didn’t know why. You get funny ideas sometimes when you’re tripping, except they seem perfectly normal. It seemed like I
had
to plunge the sink. So I got the plunger and did it ... and all this
shit
came out of the drain. I still don’t know how much of it was real shit and how much was head shit. Coffee grounds. An old piece of shirt. Great big hunks of congealed grease. Red stuff that looked like blood. And then the hand. Some guy’s hand.”
“A what?”
“A
hand.
I called to Jeff and said, Hey, somebody put somebody down the drain. But he had taken off someplace and I was alone. I plunged like hell and finally got the forearm out. The hand was lying on the porcelain, all spotted with coffee grounds, and there was the forearm, going right down the drain. I went into the living room for a minute to see if Jeff had come back, and when I went into the kitchen again, the arm and the hand was gone. It sort of worried me. Sometimes I dream about it.”
“That’s crazy,” he said, slowing down as they crossed a bridge that was under construction.
“Chemicals make you crazy,” she said. “Sometimes that’s a good thing. Mostly it isn’t. Anyway, we were into this heavy drug thing. Have you ever seen one of those drawings of what an atom looks like, with the protons and neutrons and electrons going around?”
“Yes.”
“Well, it was like our apartment was the nucleus and all the people who drifted in and out were the protons and electrons. People coming and going, drifting in and out, all disconnected, like in
Manhattan Transfer.”
“I haven’t read that one.”
“You ought to. Jeff always said Dos Passos was the original gonzo journalist. Freaky book. Anyway, some nights we’d be sitting around watching TV with the sound shut off and a record on the stereo, everyone stoned, people balling in the bedroom, maybe, and you wouldn’t even know who the fuck everyone
was.
You know what I mean?”
Thinking of some of the parties he had wandered drunkenly through, as bemused as Alice in Wonder-land, he said that he did.
“So one night there was a Bob Hope special on. And everybody was sitting around all smoked up, laughing like hell at all those old one-liners, all those same stock expressions, all that good-natured kidding of the power-crazies in Washington. Just sitting around the tube like all the mommies and daddies back home and I thought well, that’s what we went through View Nam for, so Bob Hope could close the generation gap. It’s just a question of how you’re getting high.”
“But you were too pure for all that.”
“Pure? No, that wasn’t it. But I started to think of the last fifteen years or so like some kind of grotesque Monopoly game. Francis Gary Powers gets shot down in his U-2. Lose one turn. Niggers dispersed by fire hoses in Selma. Go directly to jail. Freedom riders shot-gunned in Mississippi, marches, rallies, Lester Maddox with his ax handle, Kennedy getting blown up in Dallas, Viet Nam, more marches, Kent State, student strikes, women’s liberation, and all for what? So a bunch of heads can sit around stoned in a crummy apartment watching Bob Hope? Fuck that. So I decided to split.”
“What about Jeff?”
She shrugged. “He has a scholarship. He’s doing good. He says he’s going to come out next summer, but I won’t look for him until I see him.” There was a peculiar disillusioned expression on her face that probably felt like hardy forbearance on the inside.
“Do you miss him?”
“Every night.”
“Why Vegas? Do you know someone out there?”
“No.”
“It seems like a funny place for an idealist.”
“Is that what you think I am?” She laughed and lit a cigarette. “Maybe. But I don’t think an ideal needs any particular setting. I want to see that city. It’s so different from the rest of the country that it must be good. But I’m not going to gamble. I’m just going to get a job.”
“Then what?”
She blew out smoke and shrugged. They were passing a sign that said:
“Try to get something together,” she said. “I’m not going to put any dope in my head for a long time and I’m going to quit these.” She gestured her cigarette in the air, and it made an accidental circle, as if it knew a different truth. “I’m going to stop pretending my life hasn’t started yet. It has. It’s twenty percent over. I’ve drunk the cream.”
“Look. There’s the turnpike entrance.”
He pulled over to the side.
“What about you, man? What are you going to do?”
Carefully, he said: “See what develops. Keep my options open.”
She said: “You’re not in such hot shape. If you don’t mind me saying so.”
“No, I don’t mind.”
“Here. Take this.” She was holding out a small aluminum packet between the first and second fingers of her right hand.
He took it and looked at it. The foil caught the bright morning sun and heliographed darts of light at his eyes. “What is it?”
“Product four synthetic mescaline. The heaviest, cleanest chemical ever made.” She hesitated. “Maybe you should just flush it down the john when you get home. It might fuck you up worse than you are. But it might help. I’ve heard of it.”
“Have you ever seen it?”
She smiled bitterly. “No.”
“Will you do something for me? If you can?”
“If I can.”
“Call me on Christmas day.”
“Why?”
“You’re like a book I haven’t finished. I want to know how a little more of it comes out. Make it a collect call. Here, I’ll write down the number.”
He was fumbling a pen out of his pocket when she said, “No.”
He looked at her, puzzled and hurt. “No?”
“I can get the number from directory assistance if I need it. But maybe it would be best not to.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I like you, but it’s like someone put a hurtin’ on you. I can’t explain. It’s like you were going to do something really bonkers.”
“You think I’m a fruitcake,” he heard himself say. “Well, fuck you.”
She got out of the car stiffly. He leaned over. “Olivia—”
“Maybe that’s not my name.”
“Maybe it is. Please call.”
“Be careful with that stuff,” she said, pointing at the little aluminum packet. “You’re space walking, too.”
“Good-bye. Be careful.”
“Careful, what’s that?” The bitter smile again. “Good-bye, Mr. Dawes. Thanks. You’re good in bed, do you mind me saying that? You are. Good-bye.”
She slammed the door closed, crossed Route 7, and stood at the base of the turnpike entrance ramp. He watched her show a thumb to a couple of cars. Neither of them stopped. Then the road was clear and he U-turned, honking once. In the rearview mirror he saw a small facsimile of her wave.
Silly twit, he thought, stuffed full of every strange conceit in the world. Still, when he put his hand out to turn on the radio, the fingers trembled.
He drove back to the city, got on the turnpike, and drove two hundred miles at seventy. Once he almost threw the small aluminum packet out the window. Once he almost took the pill inside. At last he just put it in his coat pocket.
When he got home he felt washed out, empty of emotion. The 784 extension had progressed during the day; in a couple of weeks the laundry would be ready for the wrecking ball. They had already taken out the heavy equipment. Tom Granger had told him about that in an odd, stilted phone conversation three nights ago. When they leveled it he would spend the day watching. He would even pack a bag lunch.
There was a letter for Mary from her brother in Jacksonville. He didn’t know about the split, then. He put it aside absently with some other mail for Mary that he kept forgetting to forward.
He put a TV dinner in the oven and thought about making himself a drink. He decided not to. He wanted to think about his sexual encounter with the girl the night before, relish it, explore its nuances. A few drinks and it would take on the unnatural, fevered color of a bad sex movie—
Restless Coeds, ID Required-and
he didn’t want to think of her like that.
But it wouldn’t come, not the way he wanted it. He couldn’t remember the precise tight feel of her breasts or the secret taste of her nipples. He knew that the actual friction of intercourse had been more pleasurable with her than with Mary. Olivia had been a snugger fit, and once his penis had popped out of her vagina with an audible sound, like the pop of a champagne cork. But he couldn’t really say what the pleasure had been. Instead of being able to feel it, he wanted to masturbate. The desire disgusted him. Furthermore, his disgust disgusted him. She wasn’t holy, he assured himself as he sat down to eat his TV dinner. Just a tramp on the bum. To Las Vegas, yet. He found himself wishing that he could view the whole incident with Magliore’s jaundiced eye, and that disgusted him most of all.
Later that night he got drunk in spite of all his good intentions, and around ten o’clock the familiar maudlin urge to call Mary rose up in him. He masturbated instead, in front of the TV, and came to climax while an announcer was showing incontrovertibly that Anacin hit and held the highest pain-relief level of any brand.
December 8, 1973
He didn’t go riding Saturday. He wandered uselessly around the house, putting off the thing that had to be done. At last he called the home of his in-laws. Lester and Jean Calloway, Mary’s parents, were both nearing their seventies. On his previous calls, Jean (whom Charlie had always called “Mamma Jean”) had answered the telephone, her voice freezing to ice chips when she realized who was on the line. To her, and to Lester also, undoubtedly, he was like some animal that had run amok and bitten her daughter. Now the animal kept calling up, obviously drunk, whining for their girl to come back so he could bite her again.
He heard Mary herself answer, “Hello?” with enough relief so he could talk normally.
“Me, Mary.”