I rose to a world of verdure and flesh, maidens in a spring. A breeze caressed me. Birds in shadow sang. I was the voyeur in hiding. I smelled the smell of imminent love. They were angels to the last, each with Hickory’s eyes, Hickory’s nose, Hickory’s mouth of red. But soon the green had melted, and I was made a blur. Murder was a sweet and death the moon. Knowledge entered: I had been so blessed…
Gesundheit!
Dinky had been sneezing. He lay propped against the wall, Hickory beside him with a mug of steam across whose side were the words, Don’t Worry, Be Happy! She must’ve just come in. On the stool to my side sat a mug of my own. My eyes I kept nearly closed.
“The sleep’s done you good,” Hickory said.
She’d gathered her hair in a bun and stuck it through with a pen. The tattoo of a skeleton key on the back of her neck whispered in my ear. I don’t know where the lock is now. Do you? Her face was graceful, quietly sad. It darkened for a time, then the corner of her mouth lifted to a faint encouraging smile.
“Drink this,” she said.
“What time is it?” Dinky said, and spat into a rag.
“You know I don’t own a watch.”
“I want to see how long till sunrise.”
Hickory shook her head. “The sun will rise, Dinky. You know that.” She dabbed at his nose with a tissue. “Drink this.”
“It’s all bees now,” Dinky said.
Hickory paused, as though digging deep for a clever word. She looked sheepish. “The I’ll-be-damned kind or the I’ll-be-a-son-of-a-guns?”
“In my head I mean.”
“Drink.”
“I mean it’s not fires any more. Just bees.”
Hickory drew back the curtain. She leaned into the window till steam fanned out before her. “Pretty soon,” she said, “Basil and that old man will be back with the truck.”
“I want to ask you a favor.”
Her smile was pretense now for sure. And her voice sounded weaker, the skin on her face was tight. Anyone could see she’d grown thin on all the faking.
“Just so long,” she said, “as it doesn’t involve taking off my clothes.”
“Your name. Hickory, I mean. It’s not you.”
“Someone here’s forgetting that someone else made it up.”
“I mean, I was wondering, you know, if you’d mind if maybe I called you by your real name.”
“I don’t care what you call me. You know that, too.”
“Mira then. How about I call you Mira.”
“Anything you want, Dinky.”
After a time my pal sipped from his mug and said, “I saw you dancing. Tonight, when Super brought us back.” Hickory smiled. “I told Andrew you moved like smoke.”
“Maybe we can go some time,” she said. “The five of us together, when we get out of here?”
“Maybe.”
“Dinky.”
“Leave me alone now. Can you do that for me?”
“You know that’s not what you want.”
“I’m really, really tired,” said Dinky, crying now.
“No, Dinky,” she said, “I won’t.”
III
THE MUG BESIDE ME SMELLED OF WHISKEY AND something else, some kind of flower, it seemed. White string dangled from its side. Hickory, I figured, had got resourceful. I cleared my throat.
“I made you some tea, too,” Hickory said.
“It tastes like ca-ca,” Dinky said, so strange, his face still wet with tears.
“That,” Hickory said, “was supposed to be a surprise.”
I forced a yawn and then a smile, and took the teabag from my mug. On the end of the string was something like a bandage. “What the hell?”
Hickory’s mouth was a tight blue heart. “It’s my secret brew.”
“Jesus,” Dinky said.
“If you really want to know,” Hickory said, “it comes from a jam jar.”
“A jam jar.”
“Like the thing that keeps what you put on your toast?”
I looked again at the so-called teabag. “No toast I’ve ever had.”
“Yeah?”
I studied the thing. The image of a jam jar with a big fly’s wings bumped through my head. Then I remembered it, that scene from a few years back, with Lucille.
“Is this what I think it is?”
“You can think it’s whatever you want, but it came from a jam jar.”
“We’ve been everywhere there is to go,” Dinky said, “and everywhere we’ve been that’s called a tampon.”
Hickory meanwhile had kept her mouth tight in that little heart. Now she narrowed her eyes.
“Like I said, it’s from a jam jar.”
So far as I knew, no one had told Hickory the infamous story of Roper and Lucille. She must’ve just heard it, from Lucille herself, I guessed, probably while they were brewing this toxic grog.
I’d just come in from a long night of raves south of Market. My pal Bruno and I had hooked up with a pal of his, a shrimp of a cat named Andre. The kid was black as a raven, with a hoop through his septum and bleach his fro — a stripe front to back — and an Angel Flight suit, white, propped by a polyester shirt of midnight black, and gold enough round his neck to’ve drained Fort Knox. He was the slickest dealer I’d ever met.
But before that even, Bruno and I had dropped a few tabs of X and hit the floor to mix it with the ladies. Three spicy Filipinas caught us gawking and slithered over post-haste, wriggles and tits and laughter. We zoomed in on two and left the third to share till someone else appeared. This went on for who-knows-how-long, ten or fifteen, or forty-five or fifty. What I can say for sure is how once Bruno’s chick began to outdo mine, I weaseled my way between them. And by God if it wasn’t five minutes more that the girl had grown eight arms, a hand on my chest, a hand in my hair, another on my Jean Jeudi.
“Your cock,” she said, “I want it so bad in my mouth.”
So that’s how it was going to play. I’d give the she-devil what she wanted, all right, but first she needed some good old-fashioned romance. We went on with the dancing and kissing, the girl chanting in my ear the whole damned time, great godly filthy things, working herself up, I could see, into a frenzy. It was only after I’d run my hands across her rack a few hundred times that it struck me things were out of joint. Where, for crying out loud, was all the T&A? And then like a nightmare born I realized this goon had no more cleavage than the side of a train. In a panic I ran my fingers through her hair — a freaking wig, no doubt, coarse as a mop. Still, I had to be sure, and the only way to accomplish that was to stroll through the sanctum sanctorum. The X by then had me like a blight. Half of me didn’t give a flying rat’s ass what this thing was — part man, part woman, a little bit of beast — the other half swam with horror and rage. I spent a few minutes working up my nerve while whatever it was tried to swab my ear clean with its fruity tongue.
“Oh, sugar,” it whispered, “I’m so wet down there, so wet for you.”