The brothers came in from the patio to get a couple of beers. James liked to mix his with lemonade. “Hey, you oughta do something or other for her2” he said when they encountered Jamie, who was relaxing furiously before the television in a canvas chair. Wearing a teeshirt and cut-offs, her legs crossed Indian-style, she zeroed her gaze microscopically at The Wild World of Animals and sucked on a glass of ice-and-wine in the hope of drawing herself back from what she considered to be the edge of things.
“I figure, just leave her alone till whatever it is goes through its whole life-span,” Bill Houston said. “I can’t afford to get involved. Her kind of trouble, the kind she’s deep into right this minute — it has a million little doodads in it. Like the insides of a watch, do you know what I mean, James?” They fell silent, watching the show’s host frolic with some leopard cubs outside of his safari tent. It bothered Bill Houston that Jamie was turning into the kind of person you could talk about when she was right there in the room with you.
He sat on the couch which, by night, was Miranda’s bed. Before him stretched a day without prospect, but he experienced no boredom. He had stepped onto the nearest moving thing. They’d made their plans. They were going to do a job. Countdown. Even the ordinary things were invested with life, and he looked forward with interest to the next television show. “Bastard’s kinda wiry for an old guy,” Jamie said, meaning the gentleman on the screen. She chewed the ice from her drink energetically, banging the empty glass on the instep of her foot over and over.
James brought two beers downstairs from the kitchen and sat beside his brother on the couch. A midday news-break came on the television, talking about the Dow Jones, making mention of some unimportant activities of the President. “What the fuck is the Dow Jones, anyways?” Jamie said. “Man!” she shouted suddenly, stretching her bare legs out before her as if electrified. “I’m just faking a feeling,” she said.
James changed the channel. “What feeling is that?”
“I just entirely cannot use any of this shit. Intensely. I mean other days have seen me reeling and rocking and rolling, but right now I don’t even know the name of that town.”
James said, “What town is that?”
“The Town of Love. Or whatever the fuck. You know.”
“Boy,” James said. “Your reels are really spinning.”
“I got a handle on what I’m saying, even if you don’t,” she said. She got up and walked, balancing at first as if trying to stand up in a rowboat, to the stairs and then up the stairs to the kitchen.
Bill and James watched the start of the local Dialing for Dollars. “You have to be on a list for this thing?” James wondered. “Seven hunnerd and eighty-seven dollars. I hope they call us.” His voice seemed to wash away on the damp noise of the rain.
Jamie returned with another drink. Stevie was out cruising second-hand stores with a cousin, and the two five-year-olds were at the TinyTown Daycare. Baby Ellen was playing with a mobile stretched above her head across the bassinet, her fascination continually renewed for things that were always the same. For the moment, commonalities of blood and time and place made them very much a family, as the rain came down in sheets onto the patio, filling the air with the musty odor of ammonia and wetting down a city that had seen no moisture in weeks.
Nobody was watching the show. James brought a pitcher of lemonade and a fifth of Gordon’s Gin down from the kitchen. He chased straight gin with a mixture of beer and lemonade. Bill Houston sat still, enjoying and enduring the tick of his heart through a day of rain. Countdown. He kicked off his boots. “I mean,” he said, “I want to do some business — take a chance, make some money — and this guy is talking like we’re going to engage the enemy, James. ‘Outmaneuver the opposing forces.’ He can outmaneuver my dick when it goes up his rectum.”
James shrugged. “Only game in town.”
“How’d he get that finger took off? He ever say?”
“Snake bit it, I think,” James said.
“Well, I don’t know. I think he’s just one of these rabid evil Nazi worshipers. There’s no place for him with the regular folks of the world. He’s heading straight for the joint whether he knows it or not, and when he gets there they’re going to give him a hat and make him a secret colonel in the Aryan Brotherhood.”
James laughed. “He already got him a real nice hat.”
“Yeah — what’s it say on it again? ‘Alterna?’”
“Alterna,” James said.
“What’s that? Alterna.”
“He tells me it’s a kind of snake.”
“And he keeps tin foil inside of it. What’s that supposed to be for?”
James was beginning to look a little nervous. “Well, he says it keeps out the E-rays.”
“E-rays. Did you say E-rays?”
“Yes I did.”
“There really any such thing as E-rays?”
“I wouldn’t know about that, Bill Junior. There ain’t any tin foil in my hat, is all I know.”
“This is our leader,” Bill Houston said. “A young dude with tin foil on his head.”
“What can I say?” James said. “Your complaint is noted.”
Ellen began to fuss and whine in the bassinet, gaining seriousness with every breath, mounting toward wails of outrage. “Calling Mom,” Jamie said. “Baby to Mom. Come in, Mom. Calling Mom.” The rain fell. The TV talked. One breath after another. Countdown.
She was drinking a beer in Dwight Snow’s car in the Bashas’ parking lot, a shimmering lake of molten asphalt, and training the air conditioner’s vents onto her face. Though she’d pushed it up to MAX, the unit was feeble against the heat; when it blew in her face, her knees felt hot; the back seat area was twenty degrees warmer than the front. Dwight was now in the supermarket buying lemons and tequila. He had a pretty nice car here, a Buick Riviera with a red interior that still smelled new. She didn’t know how she got into these places.
Holding the can of beer between her knees, she took an amphetamine capsule from an envelope in her shirt pocket — a Black Beauty, courtesy of the youngest of the Houston brothers — and chewed it slowly. She’d gotten so she liked to break them up with her teeth, liked the bitter taste, the black taste — it was black beauty, wasn’t it? All I eat anymore.
The rear-view mirror returned her face to her, cavern-cheeked and bug-eyed, and when she drew her lips apart she looked into the image of canine hysteria, the teeth yielding a purple tint from days on end of red wine. Almost like a physical reality, somewhere in the upper left quadrant of her chest there lurked true knowledge of what she was doing; and in the remaining three-quarters of her psyche the word on chemical abuse was Fuck You. A person needs pills for the world and wine for the pills. Anything further I’ll let you know.
It was kicking in now: the day looked brighter, and the random slow-jerk of vehicles and figures in the parking lot around her took on the satisfying rhythms and choreography of a dance. The radio’s hillbilly voices prayed for terror—