“We hadn’t planned on leaving you down and friendless, young Horatio,” he said, “if that’s what brings you through this rage.”
“Dinky needs help, right now,” I said, shivering, “but the phone’s still dead.”
“You know like we know that the closest you are to another phone is a generous league. You seen the distance between here and the next abode.”
I put a hand on his shoulder. Like his hands, it felt hard as ivory, and cold. Even out here I could smell him — cigarettes, marijuana, blood. “But what about your place?” I said, desperate, knowing as I spoke the vanity of my words. “Don’t you live somewhere here nearby? Don’t you have a phone?”
“Your phone, boy, was fixed and fixed. If it don’t work, nobody’s does.” He may as well have handed me a rock. “Where’s Laertes?” he said. “We’ll be needing his size for the expedition we have in mind.”
“He’s a little scared of you,” I said.
“And yet what with our wheels knee high in mud, we require a beast of his mass.”
Super’s company back to the cabin was welcomer to me than his presence was to Basil at it.
“Is he kidding?” he said when I told him Super wanted his help.
The old man stood just outside, smoking and sucking his teeth. “Come with us, now, Laertes,” he said, and leaned in and pointed at Dinky. “Any little fuzznuts can see what our good cousin’s worth. And as for young Horatio here, even if he does have a furious heart, well, he’s just a bit too scrawny.”
“If you think for even two seconds I’m going out there,” Basil said, “into that, with you no less, you’re one hell of a lot crazier than I thought.”
Hickory squared herself to Basil. She whispered. “Dinky is sick, Basil. Do you understand?”
“I know it.”
“So then pull on your boots and all that and help the man get help.”
“How do I know he’s not going to slice my throat once he’s got me hunched over out there in Shitholeville?”
“You should be ashamed of yourself.”
“If he was going to mess you up,” I said, “he’d have already done it.”
“That’s a joke,” Lucille said.
“Andrew’s right,” Hickory said. “Why else would he be here?”
“Oh Laeeeeee-er-teeeees,” Super said, sounding like Bugs-Freaking-Bunny taunting Elmer Fudd. Basil said nothing and glared. Super waved his pipe. “We’ve got a little something for the road, if you catch our drift.”
He’d poked my friend where he was soft. Basil knew about Super’s drugs. That’s a thing he’d never forget.
“And this is no ordinary bud we’re talking about,” I said. “You get some of what he’s got and you’ll be riding a freaking dragon.”
Basil looked at me and Super and then at Super’s pipe. Then he pulled his porkpie down and said, “What’s a little more rain?”
DINKY’S HEAD ALONE DIDN’T WEIGH TWO-FORTY. And he wasn’t fat, either, just thick as a Nordic killer. And something else that confounded the world, myself included, was his skin, tan all year and, like a doll’s, seamless. It was his skin, I figured, that kept folks from seeing what a speed buster he’d been those years at Hastings, when the professor would call him out to say, for instance, whether a man who’d signed a contract with another man and then stabbed that man with a pencil could be held liable, given he’d met his contractual obligation—Mr Wainwright, will you please explain? — and Dinky, insomniacal, garbed rain or shine in rugby shirt and Bermuda shorts, would totter from his seat to hold forth like a limey MP. But just as the class thought itself with a kook, Dinky would somehow manage to conjure the magic words. “And finally, sir,” he said that time I accompanied him, “since the injury in question has nothing to do with said contract, it should rightly be considered a circumstance actionable in tort. Thus, by virtue of precedent, that being Tabucchi vs. Collins, 1976, the answer to your question must be indisputably affirmative.” And that was him. He’d huff and he’d puff like some crook on the lamb, but unless he wanted you to see it, what you saw was a man turned gold from days on a lounge in the sun, impeccable coif and skin.
Well, he was huffing and puffing now, only his hair was gone and his skin like a plum in dirt. He was so far out, in fact, it took us all to drag him to his room. We got him in the bed with his snot rags and porns, and when the gang withdrew, Basil grumbling about the dope Super’d best give him, Dinky and I were left with no one for comfort but the clown on the wall, chained to its horrible stasis.
Super as it happens never did give Basil the pipe. Fiend that he was, the old man tormented my pal, dangling the pipe before him like some thingamajig of beckoning. He knew full well Basil couldn’t resist trying to snatch it. The two slogged along for what Basil later described as “a shitload of time,” up the road opposite their aim, until at last they wound about headed toward the 50, by which time Basil had been reduced to beggary, and then to outright theft. Predictably, he said, he waited till Super lost himself in a rant on the treachery of winter before lunging at his pocket. Super, however, unlike Basil, wasn’t born at night or a fool. In short order, he slammed my friend against a tree and stuck a cutter to his throat while Fortinbras locked fangs on his ankle. Basil just stood there — what else? — helpless before the pictures in his mind, he said, though in the end they surrendered to a single image — Gomer Pyle’s face, grinning like the village dolt. Surprise! Surprise! Surprise!
For a long time I didn’t know a thing about this tale. Had Basil not called me a few months later, after I’d moved away and rented a shack by the river in Portland, I wouldn’t have known anything but what he’d told me the first time round, all of which, as it turns out, was a lie. But he did tell me, and, for what it was worth at the time, given our fix, I believed him.
The way he put it, Super slammed him against that tree strictly to air the knowledge he’d got these years wandering the vasty planet. There Basil stood, looking into Super’s eyes, knowing that for the second time in his life he was crippled. Oddly, Basil said, he almost enjoyed that sensation of helplessness, the compulsion, he said, actually to submit. I said You’re joking and he said No and I said So then now you’re addicted to crack? and he said I’m telling you, it just happened, and that was that, he went on to lay it down.
No one had witnessed his fall, he said, but Super and his dog. And if no one had seen it, how could they use it against him — at some later date, he meant, to fuck with him at the Roxy for instance or maybe the Coconut Teaszer, as he hooked into some under-aged nubile with bocci-ball tits and the ass of a little boy? He found it damn near relaxing to let Super rant on with his deep, rumbling voice. It sounded like music, almost, cozily uncertain, uncertainly familiar. Whenever I tried to butt in, Basil got all Zen and proceeded with the sappy, parson-like tongue he invoked most times for dramalogues. What with Super’s voice, he said, and the rain thrumming down and the wind through the trees, the moment made him think of some New Age soundtrack these sandal-wearing meat-haters use to fall asleep when they traipse into town. He even went so far as to confess he couldn’t tell whether he loved the old man or hated him. He wavered between wishing he could stay there forever, he said, cradled in Super’s zany wisdom, or hoping someone might come along with a pistol to pop a cap in the old man’s ass.