Then it all came to a roaring halt. I felt sick. Godawful sick. I wanted to go to bed.
I reeled down the gangplank and across the beach and bumbled into the boat. How I got those goddam oars shipped and managed to row myself across the lake will always remain a wonderful mystery.
The next thing I knew Jerry had me under the armpits and he was saying, "Thax-you all right, Thax?"
That peroxided stripper Bev was with him, and when I again made my grand announcement about doing it to the world, she threw back her head to laugh and her mouth looked like a big red fine bucket and that made me sicker than ever.
"Me and the water dish-olutioned the moon," I told them. "The water is the moon's slave but the moon is ashamed. I'm sick."
I threw up right where I stood.
"Jesus God my nylons!" Bev cried.
"Okay, okay, so I'll buy you another pair," Jerry said "Now shut up, huh? We gotta find him a bed."
"Let him lay in it, the filthy bastard," Bev said.
"Tree house," I told them. "Live in tree house with Cheeta, away away up in the rockyby blue. No You Jane in the bed. Just an ape. Like sodomy."
"What's he talking about for crysake?" Bev wanted to know.
"About diddling an ape."
"_Diddling an ape?_ Is he some kind of a nut or what?"
"Yeah, something like that. A dead drunk one. C'mon, Thax! Pull yourself together. You can't sleep in a tree."
I had decided to be a stubborn drunk. The tree house was my home and that's where I was going to sleep.
"Hell I can't. Always sleep there. Get out a my way. Going up by myself. Going up!"
"Jesus H. Mahogany Christ," Jerry said. "C'mon, Bev, get a grip on his other side. We'll have to take him up there."
"Why the initial?" I wondered.
"Well, he can fall out and break his goddam neck for all I care. I don't like mean drunks. Getting that crap on my nylons"
"He's not mean, just bullheaded. C'mon now."
"Why's Jesus need the initial?" I wanted to know.
We had a circus trying to get me up those spiral steps. And wobbling across that suspension bridge was a million laughs too-my rubbery legs moving at cross-purposes, and Jerry trying to hold me up on one side and keep on his own feet, and Bev straining her girdle on my other side, and all of us stumbling and lurching and me still worrying about the H in Christ's name, and when I gave Bev a friendly little pat on the behind she yelped, "Oh my God! Now he wants to make me. Like we didn't have enough trouble!"
"Well," Jerry grunted, "you've done it in worse places."
They reeled me into Tarzan's hut and aimed me at the bed with a good push. I collapsed like a bag of nails. Everything was going around like a fiery Catherine wheel and my stomach wanted to send up a rocket. The last thing I heard was Bev's voice.
"Hey, this is a cute little layout. We'll have to borrow it from him some night, hon."
I don't know when it was I had the feeling that little mice were playing on my shoulder blades, but it was still dark. I knew that without opening my eyes.
I didn't like the mice on my back. I wanted them to go away. I squirmed and muttered uh-uh at them. But they wouldn't go away. They kept scrabbling at me. Then I realized they were talking to me.
"Thax. Hey, Thax. Wake up, will you? I gotta talk to you. Listen to me, can't you? I got trouble."
They weren't little mice. They were little hands. That didn't make me like them any better. I pushed my face deeper into the leopardskin pillow and said uh-uh again. I felt bad. I wanted to die. I didn't want to talk to anybody.
But I wish I had. Maybe I could have helped the little guy. Maybe he wouldn't have had to die that night.
11
The scream belonged in Dracula's Castle. It definitely did not belong in Tarzan's tree house because it wasn't a fun scream. It was pure terror.
It seemed to go off right under me and it went down down down, like somebody had pulled a ripcord inside my bed. It stopped.
I sat up. My head didn't. It was in limbo. My equilibrium went weeeeee and I sagged into tilt.
"Sick," I said in a piteous voice. "Sick sick sick."
I opened my eyes and they swam around like a couple of punchy goldfish in little puddles of pain. It was still dark but some erratic blades of light were slicing through the bamboo struts of the tree house.
What idiot is doing that? I wondered. Go away, idiot. Sick.
I became cognizant of a mutter of voices rolling up under me like a restless wave and I got all panicky. What if my sick eyes were playing me a trick? Maybe it was really daylight and the marks were rushing up to the tree house to marvel at me drunk in bed in my own mess.
I stood up carefully. I didn't fall on my face. Good boy. Now-first the right foot, then the left. I walked toward the open door and it was like wading through a room made of gelatin. My eyes were all right though. It really was night.
A gang of people were milling around on the ground. Most of them were standing over something just to the left of the base of the other tree. I couldn't see what it was they were looking at. About five of them had flashlights and were chopping up the night with white light. One of the damn fools hit me in the eyes with a stab of it.
"Hey, somebody's up there!"
Big news. I started across the suspension bridge but it wasn't as easy as it looked. It and my wishy-washy equilibrium didn't get along too well. I got sick halfway across and you would have thought I'd dropped a hand grenade among them the way they yelled and scattered.
"Sorry," I mumbled.
I made it to the other tree and gave the trunk a loving hug. Somebody heavy and in a hurry was pounding up the steps. It was the storm trooper with the notebook and he'd caught some of the curdled booze on his fresh tan uniform shirt and he didn't seem to think it was such a hell of a big joke.
He threw his flash right on me and it was like being hit in the face with a baseball.
"The smart bastard again," he said. He put a grappling hook for a hand around my arm and gave me a jerk.
"All right, stupid, down them stairs!"
"Take it easy," I said. "I'm not myself."
"You never have been, smart bastard."
He gave me a shove and I slammed into the rail and reeled to the left and bumble-footed down three steps and each spine-jarring jolt did something unpleasant in my stomach. He came right after me, laying the crystalline glare of his flash in my eyes again. Stupidly, I tried to take a blind, off-balance swing at him.
He gave me a quick short one in the gut and I folded over like a newspaper. But the people below were safe this time-I didn't have anything left in me. The storm trooper gave me another sickening shove.
"I just want to get you alone for about five minutes, smart bastard," he said. He manhandled me on down the steps.
My wind was back by the time I reached the ground but I was still in sicky shape. Indistinguishable faces kept shifting by me in the flash-splintered dark. Everybody was talking but nothing they said made sense. And then Ferris was standing in front of me and he looked about as happy as Abe Lincoln did when they told him what had happened at Bull Run.
"Take that john's gun for a minute," I said to him. "I want to see him about something."
"Save the static for later," Ferris said. "What about that over there?"
"The sonofabitch gut-jabbed me!" I said. "If you don't-"
"Shut up!" Ferris yelled at me. "I said what about that?" He was pointing toward the base of the tree. I turned and looked. A couple of people stepped out of the way and I saw a little dark shape lying crumpled on the ground.