And the talk. My God, how I could talk! The right words came, the special words, so I could talk like poetry. I didn’t need the tequila. I got onto a talking jag. I put my trembling fists on the table and, leaning forward, I told them the Kathy story, all of it, and I knew as I was telling them that it was a pitiful shame there was no tape recorder there so it could all be saved. I told it all, and I finally ran down.
“He’s really humming,” Sandy said fondly.
“Too much D?” Nan suggested.
“He’s big. He can use a heavy charge. So you’re headed no place at all, Kirboo?”
“No place, on my own time, free as a fat bird,” I said. My ears were ringing. I could hear my heart, like somebody hammering on a tree.
“We’ll go to New Orleans,” Sandy said firmly. “I’ve got wild friends and playmates there. It’ll be a long ball. We’ll scrounge a pad and live fruitfully, man.”
“This party gets bigger, we can rent a Greyhound,” Nan said sourly.
“Look at all he can learn,” Sandy said. “We can take his mind off his problems, Nano. Where’s your milk of human kindness?”
“We don’t need him,” Nan said.
Sandy, quick as light, thumped her so hard on top of the head with his fist that for a moment her eyes didn’t track.
“You’re a drag,” he said, grinning at her.
“So we need him,” she said. “You don’t have to clop me on the skull, man.”
“I can let Shack do it, you like that better, doll.”
I didn’t know at that time where she kept the knife, but it appeared with a magical swiftness, clicking, the blade lean, steady, pale as mercury, ten inches from Shack’s thick throat.
“Hit me one time, Hernandez,” she said, barely moving her heavy mouth as she spoke. “Just one time.”
“Aw, for Chrissake, Nan,” he said unhappily. “Put it away, huh. I haven’t done nothing.”
There were two customers at the bar. The bartender came around the end of the bar and over to the table. “No knives, hey,” he said. “No knives. Don’t give me trouble.”
As Nan folded the knife and lowered it below the edge of the table, Shack stood up. There was a hell of a lot of him to come up so quickly and lightly. “You need trouble?” he asked.
“No. That’s what I was saying, fella. I don’t want trouble.” He turned away. Shack caught him in one stride, caught him by the forearm and spun him around.
“I got mixed up,” Shack said. “I thought you were asking for trouble.”
The man was big and soft. I saw his face turn suddenly gray and sweaty. I didn’t understand until I looked at Shack’s hand on the man’s arm. Shack seemed to be holding him casually. But his iron fingers were deep in the soft, round arm. The man’s knees sagged and he forced himself erect with an effort.
“No... trouble,” he said in a weak, gasping way.
“That’s nice,” Shack said. “Okay.” For a moment his face was contorted with effort. The man gave a faraway bleating sound and closed his eyes and sagged down onto one knee. Shack hauled him up, gave him a gentle shove toward the bar and released him. The man tottered back to the bar. Shack sat down.
“The philosophy of aggression,” Sandy said. “She got sore at me and took it out on Shack who took it out on fatso. Tonight, when he gets home, he beats up on his old lady. She kicks the kid. The kid kicks the dog. The dog kills a cat. End of the line. Aggression always ends up with something dead, Kirboo. Remember that. It’s the only way to end the chain. She put the knife in Shack’s throat, that would have ended it. We’re all animals. Let’s get out of here.”
We went out into a low slant of sunlight. I had the cheap, shiny, Mexican suitcase. Sandy Golden had his rucksack slung over one shoulder. Nan carried a large, sleazy hatbox, a drum-like thing covered with red plastic stamped in an alligator pattern. Shack had his few possessions in a brown paper bag. The world was bright, aimless and indifferent. We hitched for an hour. There were too many of us. It didn’t seem to matter. Nan sat on my upended suitcase. Sandy talked about the sexual implications of the design of the American automobile. In the last light of the day an old man in a stake truck stopped. He had the three of us get in back and he got Nan in front with him. He dumped us in Brackettville, thirty miles away. He had to turn north there. We ate questionable little hamburgers in a sour café.
I had been with them long enough to sense the undercurrents between them. Shack was stalking Nan with a relentless patience, with implacable purpose. When he moved near her, his neck looked swollen. She was aware of it, and so was Golden. But Shack was stopped just short of savage directness by his pathetic desire to please Sandy in all ways. It wasn’t the knife stopping him. I’d seen him move. He could have cuffed it out of her hand before she could have used it. The focus of his desire was so strong it was like a musk in the air.
We found a place in Brackettville. A dollar and a half a bed, Moldering little eight-by-ten cabins faced in imitation yellow brick, each one with an iron double bed that sagged like a hammock, one forty-watt bulb, one stained sink with a single faucet, one chair, two narrow windows, one door. Cracked linoleum on the floor. Outhouse out back. Sheets like gray Kleenex. Nails in the studding for coat hangers. The Paradise Cabins.
There were six cabins and we were the only trade. We took three. Four and a half dollars for three beds. We sat around Sandy and Nan’s cabin — Shack on the chair, Sandy and me on the bed, Nan on the floor. We talked. Sandy finally doled out pills.
“These all by themselves are death, man,” he said. “You go down six feet under, where the worms talk to you.”
We broke it up. I was in the middle cabin. I wasted no time piling into the sack, trying not to think about bugs. I fell away so fast I didn’t even hear her come in. I woke up with a great start when she wound herself around me, saying in an irritable, conversational tone, “Hey! Hey, you! Hey!” She jostled me insistently.
I had fallen so deeply into sleep so quickly that time and place were out of joint, and with an almost unbearable joy I put my arms around Kathy Keats and found her mouth with mine. But the lips were wrong, and her textures were wrong, and her hair had a musty smell. Kathy was gray and dead, and as I remembered that, everything else clicked into place.
I took my mouth from hers and said, “Nan?”
“Do you think it’s for Chrissake little Bo Peep,” she said in a sleepy, sulky voice, administering a caress as mechanical as any song lyric.
“I didn’t know you cared, kid.”
“Shut up, will you? Sandy said pay you a visit. So here I am and so get it the hell over with, will you, without all the conversation.”
Had I not awakened thinking she was Kathy, it would have been impossible. But it was not, and so we got it the hell over with because it seemed easier than sending her back with a no-thanks message for Sandy. With meaningless dexterity, she made it very quick indeed, and rolled out and, in the faint light, stepped into her slacks. She’d left her blouse on.
“Tell Sandy thanks,” I said, with rancid amusement.