On the thirty-first floor
A gold-plated door
Won’t keep out the Lord’s burning rain—
and a cream-colored Lincoln, driven by a Mexican youth wearing a monstrous white cowboy hat, drove very very slowly through the field of her vision. Suddenly she thought of how the light off the snow in Chicago turned the white buildings pink in the later afternoon. With a trembling hand she turned off the radio. She looked down at her rubber-thonged feet, wiggling her toes with their golden nails. Since coming to Phoenix, she’d discovered she greatly relished painting her toenails and fingernails, enjoyed removing the polish and painting them again, sometimes spending a few hours at it, drinking a little red table wine and decorating her extremities — she was startled by the opening of the car’s door and a rush of hot wind. Dwight seated himself behind the wheel, tossing the sack of margarita fixings into the back seat. “Magic carpet,” he said. He turned on the radio and tuned in a classical station and put it all in motion.
They were in the suburbs east of the city hardly long enough for her to appreciate the fact; and then the immaculate serenity of high-rent developments gave out, and Jamie and Dwight confronted flat fields — gone winter cotton, and rows lying fallow — that moved away from them as if shot from something enormous toward low hills, and beyond the hills toward distant mountains dissolving into clouds, dark, hallucinatory, and vague. Dwight drove into this emptiness and stopped the car.
“Ain’t there no more town?” she asked.
“You know what that is over there?” Dwight said, pointing to a conglomerate of modernesque buildings set down in the midst of these vast fields. “That’s a college. A community college. For college boys and college girls.” He leaned forward and tapped his knuckles against the front windshield of his Riviera as if this action might dislodge the images of human structures from the glass. “Their school mascot, their symbol — the symbol of all their education — is the artichoke. I’m not pulling your leg, Jamie. Their team is called the Artichokes. The school colors are pink and green. To them it’s all a joke. And they own all this land.” He pointed behind them with his stub of an index finger, sweeping it through three hundred sixty degrees around the car. “Rich people have too much money. I intend to do something about that.”
“I heard your finger got eaten by a snake,” Jamie remarked.
“I was bitten by a rattlesnake,” he said. “I’m allergic to the anti-venom, so I lost the finger.”
She watched his profile — one giant blue eye behind the kind of glasses Clark Kent wore; one nearly jaw-length sideburn; half a mustache that was growing into a handlebar. Beneath his baseball cap he wore his hair fairly short. He looked like a person who might know how to get away with things but who really didn’t care whether he got away with them or not. His gaze was practiced and direct: he looked exactly like a convict. Alarms began going off in the fields around them. “Did Bill tell you I got raped over in Chicago?”
He moved his attention from the fields to her face. “Somebody said something about it.”
She wanted to be clear: “If you touch me you will die.”
He blinked twice. The classical music played — some kind of piano — and the nozzle of the air conditioner spewed cool air. “I’ll drink to that,” he said, and reached for the shopping bag in the back seat. “You’ll find a knife in the glove compartment,” he told her, peering into the sack and selecting a lemon.
From under various maps protruded the black handle of a switchblade. Opening it she startled herself — it almost flew from her fingers when she touched the button. Dwight placed a lemon on the dash before her. “Get us a couple thin slices, okay?” Taking the bottle of Jose Cuervo Gold from the sack, he removed its cap and savored its aroma.
Jamie hacked at the lemon, holding it awkwardly in midair. To the right of the car something moved, and then it wasn’t there. Blood flowed from her thumb. “Starting to see things out of the corner of my eye. Over my shoulder, kind of like.”
Dwight tore a strip of paper from the shopping bag, and she wrapped it around her thumb and finished slicing.
But now Dwight seemed to have forgotten the tequila. “I wrote several screenplays in the Army, which I would like to see produced. Prospects would be considerably enhanced if I could see to the financing myself. One was a sequel for the Smokey and the Bandit films—Smokey and the Bandit III. The return on investment there could be very impressive. That’s why we’ve kind of entered into this arrangement, me and the three Houston brothers. One of whom you are connected with intimately.”
“If you’re trying to tell me you guys got some excitement lined up for yourselves, forget it. I know all about it.” But why hadn’t anyone told her exactly what was happening? Hot wires of rage flared in her skull, and it was all she could do to keep them from breaking out of her temples. They’d all been keeping her in the dark, like a child in a house of sickness.
“I just want you to know we’re not all fucked-up cowboys here. In this business I usually find myself working with individuals who can’t see past getting a little cash in hand. But I see this project as one piece, one step along the way. One assesses one’s talents and does whatever is necessary to, like, maximize their potential. Make them bear fruit.”
“One gets one’s jive down and starts talking one’s shit.” She ate another capsule out of her shirt.
“I can be a real force in the film industry,” Dwight insisted.
The clouds were wild and black and slowly moving. It was the flattest field she had ever seen. Dwight rested his arm on the seat, around back of her, the fingers light on her shoulder. “We’re all in this general project, all of us together,” he said. His arm was definitely around her. She thought it infinitely strange. “But some of us are doing one thing, and others are into something else entirely. It’s like this,” he said, and turned his huge eyes upon her. “There are some people who are in business, who move in the realm of profit and loss pure and simple”—his mouth appeared to her suddenly as a flapping vagina, a woman’s sex—”and who just naturally pick up that pistol when trying to locate capital. Then there are these low-IQ trigger-pullers who just like to play very very rough, especially with themselves. They think dying by the gun is noisy enough that it must make sense and they figure it just can’t hurt that much, something that noisy.” Something was happening to the bottoms of the clouds — as the sun lowered into the space beneath them and touched the mountains, they burned with a pure golden light. “Some are in it for profit, Jamie, and others are in it for loss.” Those eyes were eating her face. “Just be aware,” he said, “that duplicates are being eliminated.”
On most levels she didn’t follow at all; and then on another level she understood perfectly, the level where methedrine married itself to every word. Rather unexpectedly it occurred to her that her husband Curt, about whom she scarcely ever thought, had been a nice person. These people were not. She knew that she was in a lot of trouble: that whatever she did would be wrong. The darkness — the nothing — the absent places behind doors and inside of things — she looked out at fields in the grip of a miraculous sundown. “You are one scary person,” she told Dwight Snow. “I won’t be surprised when they put a stop to you.”
He took a lemon slice from her lap, unwrapped her finger of its brown bandage, squeezed a red drop onto the pale yellow moon as he held it. “You heard of blood rituals? Cannibal rites?”