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“Well,” Malatesta said, “inna first place, you gotta keep in mind that if you got yourself mixed up with Fein you are already obviously not very smart and you probably need as many guys as you can find, if you got any plans involve staying out of jail, on account of if you’re listening to Fein, if you are in a position which has got you listening to him, then you obviously do not know how things are yourself, on your own, and you need somebody to tell you. I was you, I would not want to listen to Fein either, because I have got good reason to know that Fein is an asshole, is what Fein is, and the only reason nobody has put him away for a long time yet’s because he’s just cute enough to find a bigger asshole’n himself to do the things he ought to’ve gone to jail for himself. Which in this case is you.”

“I don’t have no choice,” Proctor said. He rubbed his hand over his face. “I did that stupid thing… The last stupid thing I did recently was when Clinker Carroll got outta Walpole there and they had this homecoming thing for him the Saturday night before Memorial Day up there in that joint in Swampscott, you know?”

“Clinker didn’t last long, I’ll say that for him,” Malatesta said. “How long was he on the street, he got hooked again? A week? Less’n that.”

“About a week,” Proctor said. “Week or ten days. He has the usual problem which a guy has when he gets out, which is he gets all itchy with all the catchin’ up he’s gotta do. You come out of one of those places, they oughta give you a new car, good-lookin’ broad, ten grand walkin’ around, save a hell of a lot of chasin’ guys around that just came out. But, he’s out on bail now. Which is another thing of course.

“Anyway,” Proctor said, “like a fuckin’ asshole I go to Clinker’s party. And like the horse’s hang-down that I am, I get myself shitfaced. And I agree, I’m gonna take this guy home that I don’t even know his name, even, that lives in Framingham. And naturally, we get inna car onna Mass Pike and he’s drunker’n a goat himself, and we’re doing sixty-five, seventy. I’m all over the road and it’s a perfect night for that, of course, because there ain’t no more cops out that week-end’n there are at your average riot down the prison, and what does this asshole that I don’t even know, that I’m being nice enough, I’m drivin’ him home? What does he want to do? He wants to fight.

“I couldn’t fuckin’ believe it,” the fat man said. “As drunk as I was, and I was pretty drunk, I could not fuckin’ believe it. Just a little piece of shit, this guy, and he didn’t have no knife or anything, and I says to him, I am tryin’ talk him out of it, I couldn’t believe it. I’m all over the road. By now I’m doin’ at least eighty. Everything I see in front of me, there’s two of them. Every car’s got at least four taillights and ones that come with four’ve got eight, maybe sixteen, and I went.through two tollbooths without, I didn’t hit nothin’, and I’m trying to reason with this crazy drunken cocksucker. ‘Will you for the luvva Christ and his goddamned Blessed Mother calm down before you get us both in the slammer and dead at the same time?’ And he won’t, naturally, so we get out there in Weston and there’s nothin’ around but weeds and water and he hits me onna head. Right onna fuckin’ head, and I’m doin’ eighty and I already got enough things on my mind with seeing double and everything, and he clocks me one.”

“Auburn Alice,” Don said. “She the one that advertises, Channel 19?”

“I guess so,” Mickey said. “I never turn the damned CB on anymore. Too many assholes ratchet-mouthin’ shit at each other. I never heard of her. I had six thousand pounds of chicken in there I was worried about, and that was more’n enough for me. I dunno who she is.”

“That’s the one,” Don said. “That woman’s got diseases they never even heard of in Vietnam. She’s infected guys from Seattle, and guys from Monterey’ve given her new stuff to give to guys from Louisville. You oughta thank the Lord you had them goddamned chickens. You didn’t, you’d have something now they couldn’t cure unless they used a blowtorch on you.”

“What’d he hit you with?” Malatesta said.

“His fist,” Proctor said. “He didn’t have no gun or anything, thank God. And, it didn’t really hurt me much. He’s just a little guy. And he was also drunk. His aim wasn’t too good, even if he was strong. But it surprised me, you know? I was having trouble understanding things. The guy shocked the shit out of me. I didn’t expect it. I thought he was just screamin’ and hollerin’ and acting like a goddamned asshole and I was yelling at him and thinking I was either gonna calm the guy down before I got him home or else when I got him home and that car was stopped I would get out with him and cold-cock him into the rosebushes or something, and he got quiet. Then he comes barrel-assin’ out of nowhere and belts me.

“So,” Proctor said, “naturally I do the reasonable thing and pull over the side of the road and stop the car and take the keys and get out and open his door and drag him out, beat the livin’ shit out of him and throw him inna goddamned lake, right? Wrong. I take my hands off the wheel and grab the little cocksucker. I am gonna beat the piss out of him. I don’t have to take this kind of shit from some little pisspot like that, that I am doing a favour for that is Clinker’s friend anyway and I don’t even know him. But I forget, of course, that I am right then doing eighty miles an hour in a car that I am the guy that’s supposed to be steering it, and I will tell you this: I am very glad this is the Mass Pike in Weston around three inna morning when there is much of nothing around on either side of me and it’s not like I’m down on Gallivan Boulevard there on a weekday afternoon doing the same thing when some big fat nun starts marching a whole buncha second-graders across the street so they can sing at Benediction, all right? Because I got him all right and belted him right into Labour Day, but at the same time I sort of went off the road some. Into this little pond they got there.”

“Jesus,” Malatesta said.

“It was all right,” Proctor said. “It wasn’t really a pond, actually. Well, it was a pond, but it wasn’t a very deep pond. The water just came up about, when you open the car door, all right? It came in the car then. It wasn’t too deep, and the bottom was all mud or else you could’ve driven through it like you would any other puddle that was just about as deep, only about a mile across, and the car stopped in the mud and I opened the door and the water came right in. Right up to about the bottom of the front seat, you know? If I’d’ve been able to keep going, I could’ve gone right across it. It was a little higher’n the seat, actually. Went all over the console and my tapes, but what the hell, huh? And I took out a few of them little trees on the way in. But, I never did like that Monte Carlo anyways. Lousy car. Lousy on gas. This guy Carter got any idea what he’s doing, you think, on the gas thing? Jesus, first he makes me, I can’t use nothing that burns the stuff with lead in it and then he tells me I can’t use none of the stuff that hasn’t got lead in it and when I do I can kiss my house goodbye. What the hell is he doing? You got any ideas?”

“No,” Malatesta said.

“Neither’ve I,” Proctor said. “I have no idea in the world what he is doing. I wished I could convince myself that he does. It’s bad enough, I got to be an asshole, but if the goddamned President’s an asshole we are all in trouble, including poor assholes like me that can’t stay out of trouble anyway, and then what the fuck we do, huh?

“Anyway,” Proctor said, “I was thinkin’ about gettin’ rid the damned car anyway, although what I had in mind was, I was gonna sell it, not drown it, because it was all shot. But the water was kind of cold and it sobers me up. I’m soaked and I’m walkin’ around in the mud with the water up to my balls and it’s three inna morning, but then I think, Hey, somebody could’ve got themselves killed in this thing, and it could’ve been me, even. See, the little cocksucker, him I don’t care about. I wished he was dead, him causing all the trouble, except I don’t want him dead in my car, I want him dead in somebody else’s car.