“Not this again,” Lucille said.
“I fucked a stuffed monkey,” Basil said. “Big deal.”
“First of all,” Hickory said, “it wasn’t just any old monkey. It was the monkey your father gave you before he abandoned you. That’s why you killed the monkey. You fucked it, as you say. And then, because you couldn’t live with the guilt, you buried it someplace where no one would ever find it.”
“You,” Basil said, “are a goddamned fruit loop.”
“Check out the science,” Hickory said.
“Ha!” Lucille said.
“Seriously,” Hickory said. “I’m not surprised in the least. It was a very normal thing to do for a boy that age. Especially in our culture. He just did it in an abnormal way.”
Dinky rolled up on an elbow and scratched his chest. “You know what Hermann Goering said about our culture? He said, ‘When I hear anyone speak of culture, I reach for my revolver.’”
“You’re the one belongs in the loony bin,” I told Basil. He had a big whitehead on his nose I’d just noticed. “I’ll bet you even crammed that thing full of mayonnaise before you did it.”
“It’s all right, baby,” Lucille said, rubbing his back. “I still love you.”
“We think we’ll be going upstairs now,” Dinky said. “We’re going to lie down for a while.” He stood there in his Cal Bears rugby shirt and Joe Boxer boxers with their bologna-sandwich appliqués. Then he sniffled and wiped his nose and started away, dragging his feet like they were a couple of sleds. “We don’t suppose any of you would care to tuck us in?”
“I’d love to oblige,” Lucille said, “but I know how you get when a bed’s nearby.”
“Not that I’d worry so much about that,” Basil said. His face was waxy now, a veneer of cosmopolite ugly. “He ain’t exactly what I’d call, you know, at the height of his form these days.”
Dinky picked his nose. Then, his face a model of serenity, he extended his arm and with a simple motion of thumb and finger flicked the booger onto Basil’s hat. “At least our dick is straight,” he said, looking at Lucille.
“That thing better not have landed on me,” Basil said. “I’ll cut that straight dick off. Go ahead,” he said, “go to sleep. But beware.”
“I knew a guy,” I said, “who woke up one morning and went to take a pee, and when he pulled his dick out, guess what color it was?”
“You guys are so sick,” Hickory said. “I’m trapped in a shack with a grade-A bunch of sickos.”
“Black,” I said. “As your crappy gaping pupils, I’m talking.”
“In fact, to call you nothing but sickos is a kindness you scarcely deserve.”
“Turns out,” I said, “the guy had got so blotto he didn’t even know his frat buddy’d taken the thing out in the middle of the night and colored it with a Magic Marker, one of those big-ass felt-tipped Magic Markers with the refillable cartridges even.”
“I find a booger on me,” Basil said, “I’ll cut his dick off.”
“Come on, Dinky,” Hickory said. “You go lie down, and I’ll make you some tea.”
Dinky left. We could hear him shuffling up the stairs and across the floor above. No one said anything to Basil about the booger on his hat. We just poured more drinks.
“Sometimes,” Basil said, “I think, Man, that guy’s got no spine at all.”
“Character,” Lucille said. “He’s got no character.”
“No, I mean spine. Character’d be what you are. And you’re only what you are when the lights go down.”
“The guy’s been a year in Bosnia,” I said. “Sleeping in two feet of mud. Eating Ball Park Franks and Twinkies and shit.”
“We all know he didn’t go over there because he’s a patriot.”
“If you were into ninety grand of debt,” I said, “and didn’t have a way to pay it off, you’d’ve joined the army, too.”
“Dinky joined the army because it’s not the real world. Like everything else he does. To keep from doing anything real, I mean. Like a real job. Like a career.”
Hickory snorted. “What, and you call driving around HelLA a couple hours a day a career? You call that a job even, chucking papers on the curb?”
“He wouldn’t even do that,” I said, “if he didn’t feel so guilty for a life’s worth of mooching off his sugar units.”
“Bitch,” said Basil. “I’m a professional musician.”
“You’re a record company’s bagboy.”
“I’m the mother fucking mover and shaker who’s going to make your ass pay, is what I am. And guess what else? It’s only a matter of time.”
“You’re thirty-five years old, Basil. You know as well as those record people do the kiddies won’t be lining up to see your teeth fall out. Not to mention you could stop kicking everybody out of your band all the time.”
“So I’ll be fat and bald and toothless, but at least I’ll be up there. Sure as hell beats chasing pubes for a living.”
“That’s not even cool.”
“You want to be cool, be cool.”
“Look, you boobs,” Lucille said, “are we still playing or what?”
There was that briefest moment of doubt where Basil and I considered exchanging our knives for guns or throwing the knives away. But really the doubt was feigned. We knew what would happen. The kill was just a dream. The sight of blood was enough. We were only after the blood. This of course was a perversion cultivated over time, like a taste for taboo food, monkey brain or mice. The satisfaction of knowing we’d wounded one another was more than sufficient. In fact, it had become for us a fix of sorts, why our hate for one another always equaled our need. Basil and I were Siamese twins parted only in flesh.
“Hell yes, we are,” he said, “and it’s still my turn.”
“Your turn?” Hickory said.
“To ask.”
Lucille tossed back a shot. “Well ask away then,” she said. “Ask away the doo-da day.”
II
BASIL WASN’T GOING TO ASK LUCILLE ANYTHING worth her breath. He already thought he knew everything she had to say, a presumption which, so far as I could tell, was nowhere near the facts. And whereas it was true that before she’d become his woman he wouldn’t have thought twice about crushing her at every meal, now that she was his, he’d save his curiosity for the pillow talk to come.
I was absolutely positive, for instance, he didn’t know a thing about the times my ex-wife and I found the cupboards full of empty cereal boxes those three months Lucille had crashed our sofa. And if not cereal boxes, it was milk cartons at the back of the fridge, dry, or garbage cans stuffed with candy bar wrappers and foils from TV dinners. An entire roast would’ve vanished in the night, or a pot of spaghetti we’d just made, or a half-gallon of ice cream, all manner of food all of the time. Basil didn’t know, either, how those very mornings, I’d enter the bathroom to the odor of Lysol and vomit.
And neither would Basil ask why Lucille had slept with each of the three Gladden brothers that crazy summer of ’87, when after munching three grams of shrooms and a hit of blotter our friend Moo-Moo stumbled through a skylight and broke his legs; when our dealer Tony the Tongue invited four girls to the House of Men for a session of free love only to fake an epilepsy fit after two of the vixens tried to pork him with their strap-ons; when in front of the Grand Lake Theater a herd of cops arrested me and Dinky and Basil for having bombed a woman with a fire extinguisher just because she looked, as Basil claimed, like Barney Rubble with tits: while she went ape shit and chased us howling, we burned rubber through a KFC lot full of cops gathered for an ad lib feast. They caught us with three fat blunts, a bottle of wine, and a BB gun, fully loaded.