“Cause you’re feeble,” Lucille said. “And jinxed.”
“Hatchet Lady,” Basil said, classic. “So mean.”
“Just remember whose cabin you’re in,” Dinky said. “We’re here for a week.”
I punched Basil’s arm. “Hey, asshole. You get rid of the bird?”
THE ROAD WAS RUNNY AND BLACK, AND WHEN the lights hit the trees they looked like creeping skin. A DJ yammered about our noses and what Jack Frost had done.
“So whose idea was it,” Dinky said. But instead of taking his bait, like usual, I waited. He said, “We know you’re familiar with the word moronic, Andrew. We won’t talk about how we spent the last nine months in a place so cold your pee breaks on the ground. We’ll save that for our golden years. You know what we need?”
I stared at him. He didn’t want an answer. He’d ask you a goddamned question just to answer himself.
“What we need,” he said, “is Hawaii. What we need is Guam. Girls in grass skirts and pigs with apples in their traps. Mai tais is what we need, AJ.” And the gloopy bastard never drove with his hands at ten and two, either. One of them flapped about as he talked while the other hung across the wheel like an old rubber chicken. “How,” he said, “are we ever supposed to get Hickory on her back when all she can think about is misery?”
I fiddled with the radio. I pulled down the visor to hate my face in the mirror. “You take a look in the mirror these days?”
“You know we don’t like mirrors.”
“Look at you. Look at your head. Especially your head. You were planning to get laid with that thing?”
Dinky started coughing so bad he stopped in the road. “We did fine in Germany,” he said. Then he saw my retard’s face and hit the gas. “You know, with the chicks.”
“The chick, you mean. I saw her picture. She looked like a fat albino parrot. Not to mention she’s a professional thief. Not to mention she gave you the clap.”
“Fortunately for us, Uncle Sam takes care of his boys.”
I studied the water on the window as it turned to pearls and marveled at the creatures in their snowbound lairs. I thought about my grandmother, how she answered the phone to say she’d been raped, or lost her child, or found a bag of stones. She hobbled from my flat one day, and when I asked her purpose, she said, Home.
“This thing in four-by?” I said.
“What do we think?”
“We think we should get the lead out.”
The road had just two lanes. Trees flashed by, now sparkling, now black, a strobic land of bugaboos dreamed and real. We saw no cars, no people, not even the twinkle of lights on another unnamed road. The Cruiser heaved with empty cans and cigarette butts, a single dirty sock. And roasted peanuts and peanut shells, Basil had tossed them everywhere, the dashboard, the seats, one was in my hair. It stunk of laundry hampers, and ragamuffin carnivals, sculleries from days of yore…
My old toad once brought me to a creek bottom full of sycamore and oak. Everything shone in hues of green, lancets of sun pushing through the shadows. An odor of struggle suffused the air. It was the odor of springtime, of birth. High overhead a worry of jays had attacked a nest of fledglings. When my toad climbed a stone to piss the creek, I made my way to the tree. Shells lay about, and in fact a fledgling too, blue as tainted meat and with its tiny quaking eyes utterly pathetic. I took stock. Gone as God my old toad was, wandered off, not a soul could tell. I trusted in his return, however, if only to grill me, that much no doubt I’d learned. At my feet the fledgling sawed away with its little grey beak, gasping and sawing with a relentlessness only its mortality in the offing could afford. Christ but what I would’ve given to flee that place, what meager breath as witness to this struggle I myself could draw, the creature’s eyes watching mine, or rather not watching mine, not watching anything likely. To think otherwise had been absurd. They were like drops of shuddering ink, those eyes, so tiny, goddamn it, so sad, so full of such terrible, newborn horror that to call them eyes at all was somehow blasphemous. And the eyes of birds have never been the same. Answer me! they seemed to say. Answer! But I had no answer. And anyhow, I? Not even the nobility of silence was sufficient to that demand. Nothing was sufficient. I poked at the creature with a twig, and then with my toe I flipped it over, and then with my heel I crushed it…
“The army say anything to you about that bark of yours?” I said.
“The army doesn’t say anything unless you get your arm blown off.”
“You could pay down the debt yourself, you know. If you’d just get serious.”
“How much more serious can we get than clearing mines from a war zone in the middle of hellish winter?”
“Pass the bar, Dinky. Do the law.”
“There’s no need to torture us, you know.”
“I’m all gold,” I said, and took another slug. “If nothing else you got the name for it.”
“Now, class,” Dinky said with the nasally voice he assumed to mock himself. “Why is it we think Stuyvesant Wainwright the Fourth has failed the bar six times?” He raised his eyebrows and spoke in singsong cadence. “Because he didn’t learn anything in school but how to do lots and lots of drugs and drink lots and lots of booze. Let that,” he said, “be a lesson in how to fail.”
“And get sick,” I said.
For an instant through the trees the casinos glimmered down the strip. The dealers hung tight in those mad shops, I knew how, working the gamblers to their rings. Where was Hickory — her eyes, her mouth, the voice that purred from it?
“The army,” said Dinky, raising his arm strongman-like. “That takes youth.”
He turned at me to grin. Which is why I thought he might not’ve seen the mudslide on the road, though in truth he had, because all at once his eyes popped out, and we went lurching this way and that until we broke into a spin that closed on a bank of stones.
I woke up to a land of dark. Neither Dinky nor I said a word. We just sat there in the cold, and all that giant black seemed to’ve swallowed up the world. Where were all the lovely people? Where were all the vermin, and where were all the stars?
When finally I got the nerve to look at my friend, he was pinned in his seat by the wheel. It wasn’t until I’d begun to think maybe he was knocked out, maybe even dead, that he wriggled free. Out in the night, he looked like one of those freaks you see on Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, the one abducted by Martians. He stood there for a minute, then staggered off and fell in the mud.
“It used to be when I coughed I heard bees in my head. Now all I hear is fire.”
“Write a poem about it sometime,” I said, and scanned the road.
“AJ… AJ…” And then, “Please.”
“We’re buddies,” I told him. “Remember?”
Mud rushed down the mountain. The rain was an opaque sheet. I held Dinky’s head and waited.
“Get me that bourbon, would you?”
And then we heard an engine, a song for all we cared, followed by lights through the dark and, again, after something like an epoch, a truck round the bend.
“You see that, buddy?” I said, waving my arms. “That’s your guardian angel. We’ll be home in a minute.”
BASIL HAD NO BALLS TO JUMP LUCILLE TILL THE stretch last summer at San Quintín. Dinky had passed out that night, though it wouldn’t have mattered. Sooner or later she’d have left him as she did. Nearly five whole years they’d stuck it out — a goodish while in the buddy world, an eon or two for her. It was midnight on the beach, the moon was making hay. I’d stuffed my pockets with silver dollars and fireworks, and packets of musty Chiclets. The fine grey sand was dancing everywhere, across the dunes and slick opalescence where the water meets the shore. When at last I spied them in a hollow of grass, Lucille was bouncing like the bluest blue-movie girl the boys have ever seen. Doubtless neither had meant to hurt our friend. What were they, anyhow, but two sad dolts caught up in the malice of affairs? Lucille wasn’t as mean back then, either, not like she’d come to be. She was free from the fear of her corporate future, if in fact that’s what it had been. Nor did Basil ever hold ills, nothing genuine at least. He was a single child. He only knew to take what he saw. I never expected more. Still, they should’ve known better than to play with the clan. We’d pledged allegiance to it like a flag: Buddies forever, we’d promised, and we were solemn. But today things were different. I knew it. Dinky knew it, too. We all did. And now to prove it he was sprawled in a storm with his bottle, waiting for the guy that had just rolled up to save us.