“I don’t want to see the fucking volcano,” Fletch said.
“I bet you go,” Marge told him.
Fencer and Willie Wings got out and walked toward them. Fencer was wearing his white duck pirate pants and his Pima Indian necklace with a Maltese cross soldered to the chain. He wore his yellow hair like General Custer.
Willie Wings shuffled along beside him carrying a parrot in a cage. Breathless from the morning’s methedrine, he was addressing the bird. His face and the bald crown of his head were red and sweaty.
“Look at Fletch, Godfrey,” Willie Wings enjoined the parrot. “You see Fletch over there?”
Fletch turned away and lowered the brim of his cap over his eyes. He felt colder at that moment than he had ever felt in Mexico.
“It’s a good day,” Fencer declared, striking a posture before them. “Here we are and Willie Wings has his parrot.”
“Can you say ‘Fletch’?” Willie Wings asked the parrot. “Say ‘Come see the volcano, Fletch.’”
“Willie’s been tryin’ to train Godfrey to sit on his shoulder” Fencer said, “but it don’t never work. So he just carries him around.”
Willie Wings scratched at his denims with a free hand and shook the cage.
“Godfrey’s literary, that’s what his trouble is. I’m not saying he’s verbal but he’s literary. He’s like Fletch.”
Willie’s clear gaze swept the scene. Fletch remained under his hat.
“Godfrey and Fletch and Mrs. Fletch are all literary and that’s a handicap.” Willie turned from them, marched away ten steps, wheeled and approached talking.
“Which isn’t to say I don’t have my own literary side except I haven’t got the technical training in Paris and Bucharest of higher poetics before the crowned heads of Europe which is what Godfrey and Fletch and Marge think they have over me.”
He stopped and smiled on his parrot with broken teeth.
“Oh you doll, Godfrey! You pseudo-intellectual.”
“We got beer in the car,” Fencer said. “Let’s haVe a beer, Willie Wings.”
Willie set the parrot down and went to the car to wrestle the beer from the trunk.
“Willie had another bad scene with that Chinaman grocer” Fencer said as they watched him. “Pretty soon oP Hong won’t sell us no more beer.”
Marge shook her head.
“I thought you took his crystal, Fencer,” she said. “He’s really too much now and then.”
Fencer looked sad.
“Willie gave up crystal. He handed me what he had and made me swear I’d only give him what he really needed. But he got some more somewhere and he’s shooting it again. I think maybe he got it from Sinister Pancho Pillow.”
“His mind is running off its reel,” Fletch said. “He’s going to end up in a speed museum.”
“I got a deep personal esteem for Willie Wings,” Fencer told them. “My friends don’t appreciate that. He’s an avatar.”
Fletch said nothing.
“Well he’s certainly a very good driver,” Marge said.
“He’s a lot more than that,” Fencer said. “Aw, just look at him with animals.”
Fletch savored the imaginary cold under his hat brim. He considered Willie Wings’s relationship to animals and Fencer’s relationship to Willie Wings.
“Remember Willie’s dog?” Fencer asked. His eyes sparkled with humorous affection. “Remember Ol’ Crush?”
Marge laughed, joining in the mood of nostalgia. “Oh, God,” she cried, “Ol’ Crush.”
Fletch recalled the days when Willie’s mind had been clearer and he had been a dealer in the Haight. He had maintained a German shepherd named Old Crush, although according to Willie it was an Alsatian and had been trained to kill in French. Willie, in those days, had been more political and would have no traffic with German killer dogs; Old Crush had been raised by anti-fascists, and attacked at the command “Mort aux vaches.”
When a deal was consummated Willie Wings and the customer would turn on together, and when everyone was suitably high Willie would introduce Old Crush from an adjoining room.
“Don’t betray the slightest sign of fear,” Willie would advise his guests, “or he’ll tear you to pieces.”
Willie Wings set the case of beer down on the patio and stood before them panting.
“I hear you had more trouble with Mr. Hong,” Marge inquired.
Willie rolled his eyes. “Don’t think Orientals can’t sense dharma strength,” he said. “When Hong sold me that beer, we lived out the Eon of the Void together, and he fought me every step of the way.” He picked up the caged parrot and shook it. “Didn’t he, Godfrey?”
“Hong is afraid of you,” Marge explained, “because he thinks you’re crazy. He’s afraid of Fencer, too.”
“That reminds me,” Willie Wings said. “Let’s go see the volcano. Let’s take Fletch.”
“That’s why we’re here,” Fencer said. “Let’s go, Fletch.”
The rain broke suddenly, Fletch sat silently, listened to it for a while, and lifted his hat.
“Well,” he said, sitting up, “I do want to go up there and see it.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Willie Wings sang. “There are fire flowers up there, Fletch. Along the rim. Black rock and fire flowers.”
“But … I don’t think I want to go today.”
Willie Wings stared at Fletch in horror.
“I don’t like it, Fencer,” he said. “I didn’t like it before and I don’t like it now.” He looked at Marge and Fletch in turn. “Why not? I don’t understand. What is this, some kind of literary mood? Some kind of balky bolting? Some kind of not doing what the guys have come to do?”
“This would be the best time to go,” Fencer said.
“It isn’t that I don’t want to see the thing,” Fletch explained, “because I certainly do…”
He made what seemed to him an intense effort to conclude his statement but found himself unable to do so.
“Well, good,” Fencer said. “Let’s go, hoss. Let’s have a joint and go.”
Fencer had the joints under his belt. He produced them with astounding grace and speed; they shot from hand to hand like flaming arrows. Fletch took his tokes one after another, feeling that it was somehow against his will. It occurred to him that he did not have to go with Fencer and Willie Wings to the volcano but that he was very high.
“That’s all I want,” he said after a while.
“Too much,” Willie Wings cried.
They all had another joint and washed the grass sediment down with cold beer.
“I lust after that mountain,” Fencer said. “I’ve got to get up there.”
The rain stopped. Within seconds the wet leaves of the vanilla trees beside the patio were drying.
“Marge,” Fletch said, “do you want to go?”
“No,” she said.
Fencer and Willie Wings watched her.
“Why not?”
“I’ll stay down here with the kids. I have to.”
She leaned against the wall. A small lizard ran between her sandaled feet.
Fletch stood up and looked at the ocean.
“If I had said I was going,” Marge told him, “and Fencer and Willie Wings had come to take me, I would go.”
“Right,” Fletch said.
“Man,” Fencer said, “we’ve got to get up there. We’ve got to leave now while it’s light.”
“Right,” Fletch said. He picked up the thermos of Coke and alcohol and walked to the car. He felt curiously cold in the sunlight.
The inside of Fencer’s car was stifling. Fletch sat down between a tire and some empty gasoline cans. The car smelled of gasoline and the steaming rotten upholstery.
Fencer and Willie got in. As the car pulled away, Fletch watched his wife go inside and close the door.