“If you don’t think you’re going to make it home,” I said, “you can stay here.”
Randy looked at Vanese, questioningly, and with her own shrug she nodded. “All right,” he said. “Thanks, man.” More diffidently, “You feeling any better now?”
“I feel fine. I feel like more beer.” Nakota looked at me, nodded contemptuously toward her untouched beer. Randy immediately got his coat on.
“You going home?” I asked, surprised, and he said, “The least I can do is get you some beer, man.”
“It’s too bad to drive,” Vanese said, but Randy shook his head, irritated at her objection; she returned to her seat beside me on the couchbed. For some reason, again her own and having nothing to do with jealousy, this pissed Nakota off.
“Why don’t you go with him?” she said pointedly to Vanese.
“Why don’t you go to hell?”
“Ladies, ladies, please,” I said, possessed all at once of a weird good humor, “come on now. If you must fight, at least use your fists.”
Randy laughed, big loud resonant horse laugh and I smiled, as much at the sound as my joke, my mood, twisted lips and Vanese smiled back at me, an astonishingly sweet smile that took all the wariness from her big eyes. Even Nakota smiled. And then we were all laughing, the whooping laugh of relief, the way you laugh when they show you the X rays and it’s nonma-lignant, for now anyway, and the doctor has a small but distinct booger hanging out of his nostril and you and everybody else in the room can see it and as soon as he leaves you laugh your ass off; like that.
Randy took a while coming back with the beer. Nakota turned the music back on. Vanese, still beside me, tapped her knee in time, her nails were chewed past the quick. I drank all of my beer and Nakota’s too. Nobody said much but there was still, like smoke in the air, a feeling of fragile camaraderie; foxhole love. Funhole love.
Not only beer, but a couple bags of chips, some candy bars. Randy stood shaking off like a dog in the doorway as Vanese took the wet-spotted bags from him. I wiped at my mouth; it was still bleeding.
“It’s fuckin’ nuts out there,” Randy said. “I didn’t even take the truck, you can’t get down the streets.” His pale hair was mottled dark with melted snow. He ripped open one of the chip bags. Vanese took a bottle out of the smaller paper bag, offered it silently to Nakota: mineral water.
We all got drunk, except Nakota. Vanese turned out to have a talent for caricature mimicry; as she enacted the scene in the storage room, our parts—Randy horrified bully, Nakota (“Shrike”) exaggerated bitch, me entirely out of it, and she, Vanese, scared shitless—became horror-movie funny; we laughed again, less hysterically, with more real humor, told what we each remembered and laughed about that too. Survivor’s humor, maybe. I thought it was funny.
It was very late, there was still beer but Vanese had fallen asleep, mouth open in a little O, Randy was close to it. Nakota, in an atypical gesture, offered them her spring bed. Randy shook Vanese awake enough to transport her there, they both crawled atop it, shoes and all. Vanese’s mouth never closed once.
Nakota stripped in the middle of the room, she had to be freezing but she never showed it, walked over to my bed and got in. If I had waited for an invitation to join her I would be waiting there still, but that was her: take what’s not yours and don’t share. Especially with the owner. Weaving a little, a lot-, I flopped down— my anesthetized body twingeing—and pulled the covers up.
“Sleeping with your clothes on,” she said. “Typical derelict.”
“Of course I’m a derelict. Derelict laureate of the Funhole and don’t forget it,” as her hands found me, purposeful stroke of my small flabby cock, “and don’t fuck me either, it hurts too much.”
“If it doesn’t hurt,” she said, death’s-head above me in the dark, “you’re not doing it right.”
5
When Nakota found I planned on ac-tually staying, as much as possible, in the storage room, to watch beside the Funhole, I saw for once her complete and enthusiastic approval; it was a disconcerting thing. Vanese thought it was a terrible idea, tempting fate on a daily basis. Randy was horrified.
“That’s suicide, man!”
“Shut up,” Nakota said. She was smiling. “He knows what he’s doing.”
Actually I didn’t, not entirely, but I knew what I had to do and this was it. I didn’t think of it as suicide or even particularly dangerous, although that was arguably a dumbshit thing to think in view of past occurrences. I just knew that I was going to do it.
Around the living room, morning-after faces on Randy and Vanese; Nakota of course like the cat that just ate shit. Randy in particular looked utterly bleached, like a dried-up chicken bone, Vanese had looked better in last night’s dark but she still looked pretty good, even scared, even mad as when she turned on Nakota and said, “Why don’t you stop badgering him and go stick your own head down there?”
“Why don’t you mind your own business?” loftily, cream-fed queen too cool to bicker with the rabble.
“He’s not your business. Nobody’s your business, you’re too worried about your own ass. What you want.” Vanese was really pissed. I thought she was going to start swinging or something.
“It’s nobody’s business,” I said, quietly, it was hard to talk this morning. My instant coffee tasted like the devil’s asshole. I drank it anyway. All that blood and beer, and half a pound bag of Raisinets, little hamster turds bubbling in my stomach like animate shit. “Nobody has to watch out for me.”
“Well she sure won’t.”
“Nurse Nancy,” Nakota’s grin. “Little Miss Pop-up Book. Vanese, don’t you have somewhere to be?”
“I gotta get to work.” Randy, shaking his head, suddenly as miserable as he was last night, surveying me on his way to the bathroom. “You don’t look real good, man,” he said, but sadly, a long sad piss without closing the door. Vanese got up, joined him, closed it for him.
“What a pushy bitch,” Nakota said, but still coolly.
“Oh come on.” At once I felt irritated with her. “You know she’s right. Why be pissed about it?”
“I’m not pissed,” dismissively, getting up to hunt for matches. She blew smoke at me, smiled with her blue-white teeth. “I’d like to get the camcorder, if I can. I think this needs to be recorded, I—”
“What’re you, Wild Kingdom?” Vanese again. Randy was slicking his wet hair back with long nervous strokes. He nudged her and she stopped.
“Take care, man,” he said to me, and then in passing, “Mind if I bring another sculpture?”
Vanese stopped like slammed-on brakes. “You too,” she said to him, with a disgust so palpable I felt obscurely flattered. “Some friends.” She walked out without him.
“Bring one if you want,” I said.
Embarrassed now a little. “Maybe tomorrow.”
As they left, Nakota smirked. “Short leash,” she said, lighting up another of her shitty cigarettes.
“Just shut up for once,” I said. All of me, the beaten parts, ached with a slow bruisy throb. Vanese had made my bandage too large and too tight, unwieldy, it chafed the skin of my wrist so
I pulled it off, lay my hand palm-up on the table, sat with eyes shut and breathing quietly until Nakota said, “Look.”
I looked. Fluid was seeping slowly from my hand and wiggling like sperm across the table.
“Shit,” Nakota said admiringly.
I closed my eyes again.
My preparations for this one-floor pilgrimage were pretty slipshod, but again, that was sort of typical and, untypically, I knew I wouldn’t be needing much. The proverbial pot to piss in, or on, depending on my aim; a pillow and blanket; pen and paper, unlined drawing paper, a big pad of it bought at the drugstore, it was meant for kids. It had a bear on it Nakota started to make fun of the bear and I told her to go fuck herself, right out loud in the store, I said if she lived to be a thousand she would never begin to approach the unconscious purity of that bear.