"Slow is all right as long as it's steady. How's that pussy you been getting?"
"You're so sensitive, Jeff. A real modern, 'sensitive' man."
Jeff laughed, paradoxically pleased by the dig, as Prentice had known he'd be, and went back into the living room to catch CNN's Sports Update. After a few minutes of pretending to work, Prentice joined him.
Near Malibu
The gunshots had given Eurydice hope, for a few minutes. She'd thought maybe it was the police. But now they'd stopped and there was only distant laughter and a scream from out there, and no sounds of sirens. It hadn't been the police. It had been the More Man and friends – playing.
There were other sounds, now – from the room beneath hers.
There was a hole in the floor, near the bed. It was too convenient, this hole being there, looking accidental but somehow punched through two layers of floor. She was pretty sure this hole and the one in the wall were put there for her and Mitch to find.
So she told herself she shouldn't play along; she shouldn't listen to what was going on downstairs. Shouldn't try to see down there.
She put her fingers in her ears and kept out most of it. Still, she heard the mesh of laughter and wailing, like roses and thorns on the same vine, and she heard someone whimpering, " Don't let it get on me don't let it get on me don't let it -! " and then she heard someone else say in a calm voice, "Plant them in his wounds." And then there was a panting… and then a pissing sound…
The crackle of bones slowly breaking. A bubbling wail.
She started yelling, just a lot of wordless noise to cover up the sounds. She dragged the mattress from the bed and dumped it over the hole in the floor. She could still hear it, faintly. She clapped her hands over her ears and paced around the room feeling she was going to rip open from the razor-sharp unfairness of it.
Her gaze came to rest on the crack in the wall. She hurried to it and squatted on the floor, thumped on the wall with the flat of her hand. Sometimes he didn't answer.
This time he answered. "Eury?" Mitch's voice. Sounding far away and unattached, like a voice heard from a TV in the next apartment.
She flattened herself against the wall, her ear pressed to the crack, head tilted down so she could talk into it. "Did you hear those gunshots? Do you think it's anything…?"
"I've seen them play with guns before."
She choked on a sob. She wasn't going to be rescued. Why should she be? It was always the same. She knew that from when she'd worked out that her mama saw her as a way to get G.A. and extra foodstamps and then money from white assholes. She was just a lump of flesh that moved around and waited to be used for something. She always had been. Why should anybody come to get her out of here?
But something in her hissed like an angry cat, made her keep looking for a way out; made her ask, "You talk to that Handy Man like you said, Mitch?"
"Yeah. Yeah. I asked him. Told him I didn't want to be -" He sniggered idiotically. "- to be, like, a hodad around here. He said maybe I'd be like the More Man someday, and maybe not, and it was something you have or you don't have… and we'd know when the time came and… I think he was just playing with me… He doesn't seem like he's even really here… Like in his head he's always someplace else… He started talking German to me, once, but dude must know I can't speak German…"
"Mitch… You ask him about me?"
"He wouldn't say anything. But they're going to use us soon. I know it. There's a rhythm here…"
"They give you Reward?"
"Head Syrup? Not for a long time now. They're saving us…"
There was another way out, she thought. "Mitch – if they busy, it might be somebody could kill theyself, you think, before they git on it?"
"Maybe. I wish we could kill each other. Wouldn't that be good?"
"What?"
He went on with a hoarse excitement, "We could strangle each other and try to do it so that we each killed the other at exactly the same second. It'd be tricky, because one would tend to fall over before the other but
– well, maybe something sharp would be better… I've got some broken glass…"
"Mitch, what the fuck you talking about? You trying to get into they heads? Is that why you saying this?"
"We could break through the walls so we could get to each other and then we could -"
" Mitch, shut up! Just fucking shut up! "
He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "I'll wait over here on my bed till you feel better."
She heard him move; and the creak of the bedsprings. Then she heard a plaintive keening from the room below. She thought she could feel the cry vibrate in the boards under her hands.
Watts, Los Angeles
It was somebody's apartment, he had no idea whose. He was being herded about by Gretchen, just now, and she'd herded him here, and he was so stoned he hardly noticed anything about it, except that it was almost as bare as Hardwick's. And it was a little bigger and the stove was still there.
There were also four children in it. Garner noticed them only abstractedly at first. Four black kids, one of them about three years old, sleeping – or trying to – on the bare floor mattress, as Garner and Gretchen and the kids' father, if that's who he was, took hits off the pipe in the kitchen area of the apartment. Little details slipped through to Garner from time to time, when he wasn't hitting the pipe: the floor sagged; the walls were yellow; the light from the kitchen glared onto the dull faces of the black children sharing a single blanket.
Garner had used his Visa card, the only credit card he had, to get cash, and they were going through that now. He was almost out of money again. How long had he been on this run? How long had he been chasing the high? It was late at night. He could hardly feel his arms and legs. He had made a few tentative tries at getting Gretchen alone, ended up looking like a jackass as he tried to fuck her standing in a bathroom; couldn't even get it up. Hadn't tried to argue with her when she said they didn't have time for this, they had to get some more crack.
And now, once more, the stuff wasn't working. It was just making him antsy for the next hit. He was almost assed out: busted, wasted, unable to buy more. How much money did he have left? Twenty bucks maybe? Maybe if he could get away from these two parasite – this babbling, yellow-eyed, middle-aged man who sometimes sputtered into a non sequitur of cursing like a victim of Tourette's Syndrome, and sallow, shrivelling Gretchen with her darting fingers. He hadn't been able to go ten feet without them following him. That motherfucker Hardwick had his van… was either stripping it or ferrying people around for money and selling everything in it piece by piece…
The last of the high seeped away from him, leaving him only tweaky rigidity in his nerves, lust for the pipe no matter how empty its reward, and the aching pit of depression that made him feel cold and hollow as a brass statue.
Why wasn't he dead yet? Constance was dead…
"You hear dat?" the guy said. What was his name? Charlie? "That de rollers?"
Gretchen shook her head. "They no cops here. You tweakin."
Charlie forgot about it, hunched down to pick at flecks of ceiling plaster that had fallen into the cracks between the floorboards. Tweaking them up between thumb and forefinger. Tasting them. Spitting them out. Garner had to fight the urge to do the same.
Thing to do was find a dealer, Garner thought; find a dealer maybe on his way to the set, smash his head with a bottle or something, take his dope and take his gun. That way he'd either get killed or he'd get some cash. Get some dope. Another hit. And then another hit.
He felt like he was dying the way Constance had died. He was being slowly crushed and cut up, too. By dope and the projects.
Maybe it was working out.
"We assed out," Gretchen said, scraping the last of the resin from the pipe with a coat hanger wire.