“Ith orful.”
“Why are you stupid?” she said. Cold, ivory anger. “You’re drunk.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s not a funny joke. Don’t bother busy people who aren’t bothering you.”
He decided to ask a stupid question. “Don’t you miss me, Etsuko? I miss you sometimes.”
He could picture her again quite clearly; her mouth would be rippled with a small tremor of embarrassment and faint disgust.
“Give me a chance,” she said. “Stop calling.”
“Christ sakes, I haven’t called you for a year. More than that.”
“When I get calls from you,” she said, “I think you’re becoming a drunken bum. Too bad for a man of your intelligence.”
“Why, you little shit,” Hicks said.
She hung up.
“Interrigence the fuck indeed,” Hicks said aloud. Her English had improved incredibly. “You little shit.”
As he fumbled for another dime, a black girl in an imitation leather overcoat walked by the booth. Hicks smiled at her absently, forgetting that his smile was missing its upper right corner. The girl stared at him and raised her eyes so that the whites were exposed and the irises fluttered under batting lids. Fuck off. As she went by, he blundered into eye contact with the other members of her party — three young men in black leatherette coats and pastel slouch hats. They were not amused.
“Asshole,” he said to himself.
He kept looking back at them as he dialed. When June answered, he turned his back.
“Hello, June.”
“Is that Ray?” She sounded ripped.
“Right,” Hicks said. “I’m down here in Oakland. I’m fucked up and there ain’t a white face in the joint. I want to make my will.”
“Your will?”
“Forget it,” he said. Laughs were hard to come by.
“Owen is here,” June said.
“Owen is here! Terrific. Lemme talk to Owen. I’ll call you tomorrow, O.K.?”
“Uh-uh,” June said. “I don’t want you to call me.”
It was Dumb Question Night.
“Why not?”
“Owen is gonna kill you if he sees you. You know he’s like armed, man. He’s insane with rage.”
Hicks shook his head. Someone tapped on the booth door with a coin. “If he’s insane with rage I won’t trouble him. Can he hear you?”
“He’s out in the garage working over the machine, like I don’t even want him to catch me on the phone.”
“He wouldn’t turn me, would he, June? He wouldn’t narc me over?”
“I don’t think so. Just don’t be around.”
“You asshole,” Hicks said. “You told him. What did you tell him for?”
“Oh, man,” June said. “Who knows why they do the shit they do?”
“The desires of the heart,” Hicks said, “are as crooked as a corkscrew.”
“That’s about how it is,” June said.
He held the receiver, hooked up with the general static. The bloods at the table were broadcasting cocaine vibrations. From his pocket he took the slip of United Seaman’s Service stationery which had Marge’s phone number writ ten on it. When he had done that, he threw a snappy little hand signal to absolutely no one at a point beside the door. One of the bloods turned to check it out.
“Odeon,” the voice said. Hicks smiled. A collegiate whine.
“Marge?”
“Yes?”
“This is Ray.”
“Oh,” she said. “Hi.”
It was nice to be important.
“I’ll fall by early tomorrow. Everything O.K.?”
“Yes. Yes, all right.”
“See you then.”
“See you then.”
He left the phone booth and went quickly out to the street. For a while he walked away from the bay, toward the hills and the lights. In the first block he came to, there were two winos butting shoulders to see which of them could knock the other down. The stopped the game as he came up and approached as though they would panhandle him, but as he passed them they only stood panting and stared.
“I’m the one in the middle,” Hicks told them.
In the next block a camperload of freaks sat eating white bread and bologna sandwiches on the sidewalk beside their vehicle. Hicks paused to watch them eat. One of the boys turned around to glare at him and he was offended. “I’ll fuck every one of you,” he declared.
“Oh, wow” one of the girls said through a mouthful of bread and meat. They turned their backs on him.
“I was only kidding,” Hicks said. “I wouldn’t really.”
In a third block was a bar with playing cards and wheels of fortune painted on the windows. The inside walls were dark blue and decorated with the same symbols but the customers were mainly old men. Whatever arcane scene once informed the place had moved on. Hicks sat down at the bar and continued with his party.
His head was going bad. The painted cards and dark walls oppressed him. Accumulated venom — from Etsuko, Owen, the blacks in the Gateway — was fouling his blood. He did not get drunk very often and sometimes then he did a gulf formed between his own place and the field of folk. His own place was represented by a tattoo he wore on his left arm. It was the Greek word Å’óèëüò; Hicks understood it to mean Those Who Are. When people asked him what it meant he often told them it meant that he was paranoid.
A familiar rage descended on him; it was like a binding in which he could hardly breathe and only blows could loosen it.
He sat drinking, trying to writhe free. For a while he tried to escape by pondering what things he might do with the money, but the money was in the hands of devious fuckups, and he became even angrier.
Just as he was attempting to summon sufficient self-interest to remove himself from the street, a rabbit-mouthed longhair came into the place, chewing on a toothpick, and settled himself a short distance up the bar. It occurred to Hicks that the youth might attach to the old action; he found the kid’s presence and proximity disproportionately offensive.
The youth ordered a beer in a New York accent and drank it with a pill. He dropped his toothpick on the bar. When he saw that Hicks was looking at him, he said:
“What do you say, Cap?” When Hicks did not reply, he flashed him a quick approving downward glance.
The kid was a pogue. It seemed to Hicks that if he got any drunker and his place any lonelier and more savage he might actually have some sort of a shot at him. The prospect, however remote, revolted him.
“You see the fight last night? What a fuckin’ slaughter, right?” The kid advanced a step or so closer. “I tell you the only way you get a nigger to bleed is put a razor in your glove.”
Hicks decided that he was crazy. He was not opposed, in principle, to beating up on crazy people. “I’m from New York,” the kid said. “You been there lately?”
Hicks finished his beer.
“Nobody asked you where you were from. Mind your fucking business.”
“Far out,” the kid said. He did not seem at all discouraged. It was on rails now, Hicks thought. He became impatient for the thing to begin. The kid studied him thoughtfully as though on the point of a decision.
“You’re one mean motherfucker, right?”
Hicks shrugged and stood up, his right shoulder stooped.
“I’m what?”
The kid began talking fast New York.
“I said you were a bad motherfucker, man like you look like you could handle yourself. Like I wouldn’t fuck with you.” He held his hand out with the palm facing Hicks as if to intercept a blow.
“I thought you were.”
“Jesus, Cap, I apologize. I’d buy you a beer and a ball but I ain’t got the bread. This is my last quarter I swear to God.”
“I don’t want your beer, pogue.”
“C’mon. Don’t call me that.”
“I don’t want your beer, pogue.”
“O.K.,” the boy said, “if you’re gonna be like that.”