From down the hall came a gentle muttering. Around the corner I caught sight of a pale flickery glow escaping through a half-closed door. I pushed it open. A lounge chair faced a pint-sized color TV set on an orange crate. The chair was an island throne rising from an ocean of beer cans, pizza boxes, take-out cartons, grocery sacks, empty tins, condom packets, shrinkwrapped cookies, crumpled tissues, video cases, batteries. You name it, it was there. Stretched in the chair, wearing bib overalls, lording it over this his solitary realm, was the fucking vulture god of decay. He was thinner than the last I saw him, his beard about six inches longer, but he still had the worst comb-over in central Florida. The dirt on his ankles made an argyle pattern. His right arm dangled off the chair arm, his fingers almost touching a settlement of pill bottles on the floor. He was watching football. The Gators and somebody. I asked who was winning and he tipped back his head, trying to find me, but not in an awful hurry about it.
“Shit!” The word leaked out of him like a last gasp. He gave a blitzed laugh, two grunts and a hiccup. “That you, man?”
I picked a straight chair from beside a sheetless mattress in the corner and sat so he could watch me and the TV both.
“Maceo.” He made a fumbly gesture, patting an invisible dog by his knee. “Crazy motherfucker. Where you been?”
“Raiford. New Smyrna for a while after.”
“Oh, yeah… right.” Rickey’s face was gaunt, greasy with sweat, ready to crack and sag. The bridge of his nose was swollen and had a ragged cut across it that wasn’t healing too good.
I asked what he was up to and he said, “Dilaudid. Crystal meth. Mostly Dilaudid lately. You want some? I got a shitload.”
“There’s people with me. We need to hide out here a couple or three days.”
He blinked rapidly. It was like part of his brain was attempting to semaphore another part that trouble was at hand, but the message didn’t come through. “Yeah… okay, he said feebly. Wherever you want, y’know. There’s rooms.” His eyes, charcoal smudges, returned to the TV. A faint cheer mounted as a tiny guy in blue-and-orange scampered down the sideline. The Gators were kicking ass. Rickey made a grinding, choking noise in the back of his throat. I knew that paved-over feeling in the esophagus, the warm dry space that kept him safe from the guttering of his own life, the valueless thoughts featherdusting the inside of his skull. Like a perfect fever.
“I’ll take a few of them Dilaudid, you don’t mind,” I said.
“I told you go ahead. His fingernail ticked one of the bottle caps. I got a whole shitload.”
I kneeled by the chair, palmed one of the bottles and shook four white tabs out of another.
“You get settled, come on back you wanna talk.” Rickey wriggled his ass around as if he had an itch.
“Yeah, maybe. We’re kinda wore down.”
“Hey, Maceo!”
I could see him looking for a way to hold me there. I guess I’d reminded him he was lonely.
“’Member that little honey you’s fucking, one with the blue streak in her hair?”
“Twila,” I said.
“Yeah, her. She got the virus.” He said this with the sort of cheerful expectancy you might use to announce the birth of twins. “’Spect some of them NASCAR boys better get theyselves checked,” he went on. “Last I heard, she was passing out blowjobs at Mac’s Famous Bar like they was dollar kisses.”
“She musta knew what she was doing. Twila didn’t give a shit.” My feet crunched the litter ocean as I stepped toward the door.
“Maceo?”
“What?”
“You wanna bring me something from the ’frigerator? I got pizza in there and I’m too fucked-up to walk.”
“I’ll do ’er in a while.”
The corridor had gone dark. I stood a moment, getting my bearings, and heard Rickey quietly say, “Oh, God… God!” Maybe he was hurting, maybe the veil of the future had lifted and he saw a shadow stealing toward him. Or maybe it was the Gators done something stupid.
Leeli had spread sheets on the bed in a room off the kitchen, and sealed a hole in the window screen with a stuffed rag, and secured a lamp for the bedside table. She was sitting on the bed, her knees tucked to her chin, tanned legs agleam in the tallowy light.
“What we gonna do?” she asked.
“I told you what I wanted to do back in Ocala.”
She hid her face, resting her forehead on her knees. “It’s not back in Ocala now. We gotta figure something to do.”
“Don’t know about you, but I’m getting high. I showed her the pills.”
“What is it?”
“Dilaudid.”
“Is it something good?”
“It’s evil. You gonna fucking adore it.”
I powdered a handful of pills in the bottom of a teacup and let Leeli feed her nose from the tip of a knife blade.
“Oooh,” she said, sliding down in the bed, closing her eyes.
“What I tell ya?”
I did more than Leeli, enough so the world fitted around me like a warm liquid glove and there were little sparkles at the corners of my sight and when I moved my hand I felt the exact curve of my shoulder and the muscles playing sweetly in my arm. I lay back next to Leeli. The ceiling was bare gray boards and beams with black grainy patterns and sparkles pricking the gaps that were probably stars. It looked distant and enormous, part of some ancient building that was proud of itself, a church where saints and great soldiers were buried, and terrible instruction was regularly given to the faithful, lots of Go-thous and Verily-thee-must-hastens that resulted in dungeons filled with bones and chained apes with blood on their teeth and crestfallen martyrs, but it didn’t have no message for me. My eyelids were trying to droop and my mind drooped too, blissfully trivial, noticing stuff about the high, the tremor in my leg, a pincushion sensation in my left foot, a nerve jiggling in my chest. Something landed softly on my stomach, its warmth spreading like a melting pat of butter. Leeli’s palm. Feel up to having some fun? she asked. Her hand slipped lower and she flicked my zipper.
“I ain’t never gonna say no, but I’m pretty damn wasted.”
“Me, too. I don’t really need to or nothing. I just want to see what it’s like… when I’m like this, y’know. Okay?”
We fucked like space babies in no gravity, coming together at goofy angles, forgetting for long moments what we were doing, our minds scatting on some loopy riff, reawakened by the touch of lips, a breast, something that got us all juicy and eager for a time, speeding it up and lapsing again into slow motion, into stillness. It took Leeli damn near an hour to come and once she started it took her almost the same to stop. She curled up into me after like a dazed, sleek bug that had eaten too much of a leaf and said, “Sweet Jesus. That was amazing!” I was too gassed to respond. If we’d been a pair of spiders, she could have gnawed off my legs and laid eggs in my belly and I wouldn’t have argued the matter.
Leeli had some trouble sleeping due to the itching that goes with the Dilaudid wearing off, but finally her breathing grew even and deep. I did a few more hits, pulled on my pants and went onto the porch. A wind had sprung up, driving away the skeeters and quieting the frogs. Clouds edged with milky light were racing the moon, parting around it, and the grasses gave forth with an approving chorus, like the sound Leeli made when the Dilaudid rushed upon her, only louder by a million throats, seeming to appreciate the architecture of dust and reflected fire in the sky, the hosanna clouds, the lacquered moon-colored water, the grasses tipped in silver, the black cut-outs of the palm islands like left-over pieces of Africa. I had that feeling of small nobility and pure solitude the world wants you to feel when it reveals this side of itself, so you’ll believe nature was this awesome beautiful peaceful rock concert deal before man come along and doggy-fucked it full of disease, and not the bloody, biting, eat-your-meat-while-it’s-alive horror show it truly is. That night I was okay about feeling this way and I walked along the shore, sucking in the odors of fish and frogs and the millions of unrecorded deaths that had accompanied the HoJo manager’s as if they were the latest Paris perfumes.