Ranch woke in the beanbag chair. He was used to the disappearance of large parts of his life. Sometimes, he passed out at ten o'clock in the morning, and when he woke up, it was nine o'clock in the morning-some other morning. At first, the time changes were disorienting, but over the course of a couple of years, he got used to it. He simply gave up on time-now life was daytime and nighttime, strung along like beads on a string, and the minute, hour, and date were irrelevant.
When he woke up in this darktime, he could hear Whitcomb screaming in the kitchen, which wasn't unusual, and wouldn't normally have shaken him out. He pushed up, and a string of drool drained away from his lip. He wiped it off, heard the noise that woke him. Telephone, right under his head.
Whitcomb had backed Briar against the wall, extracting details of her arrest, when Ranch wandered in from the other room and handed Whitcomb a phone and said, "I got George, scrote."
"Who you callin' fuckin' scrote, you fuckin' douche bag?" Whitcomb shouted, and then stopped, as Ranch's words penetrated, and said, "George?"
Ten minutes later, Whitcomb was careening around the living room and kitchen in the wheelchair, waving his head-shop pearlescent-gold-twirl glass pipe over his head, shouting, "George is on the way." And he whirled in the chair and chanted it, waving the pipe as though directing an orchestra: "George is on the way; George is on the way; George is on the way."
He was rolling back toward Briar, pipe over his head, spasmodically jerking it back and forth, in time to the arrhythmic chant, and it slipped from his sweaty fingers in a long dangerous arc. Briar reached out to catch it, fumbled it, fumbled it again, and then it hit the side of the stove and shattered, and they all three stood looking at it, in all its pieces, scattered along the kitchen floor.
Whitcomb's mouth opened and closed, and, stunned, he said to Briar, "My fuckin' pipe. You broke my fuckin' pipe."
He looked around for his stick, saw it, looked back at her, hate in his eyes, but then Ranch said, "Fucked-up yuppie pipe anyway You waste half the smoke; I can make a better pipe in eleven minutes, yo."
Whitcomb said, "Make a pipe?"
Ranch had skills: there were a few ancient tools under the sink, left behind by a previous tenant. Included in the greasy, cobwebbed old green canvas bag was a pair of side-cutters and a rusty file. Ranch unscrewed a forty-watt GE Crystal Clear bulb from a sconce at the bottom of the stairs, and said, "A perfect bulb. Don't even have to wash the motherfucking white shit out."
"What white shit?" Whitcomb asked.
"Some bulbs got this white shit in them," Whitcomb said. "Tastes terrible."
They gathered at the kitchen table, and Ranch used the side-cutters to cut off the contact at the bottom of the bulb, and then carefully crack out the ceramic insulator that had held the contact in place. With the insulator gone, he broke the glass rod that held the light filament in place, and pulled the broken pieces of glass out of the bottom of the bulb by the wires that led to the filament. All that, he brushed onto the floor.
"This is the hard part," he said. "This is where you can fuck up if you don't know what you're doing."
Using the edge of the file, he scratched a line across the glass of the bulb, then went back into the scratch and drew the file across it again, and again, slowly, carefully. In two minutes, he'd opened a narrow hole to the inside.
"Really careful now, so's we don't break the glass…" He was breathing his words, holding the bulb, working the file with some delicacy. In another two minutes, he had a hole an inch long and an eighth of an inch wide. "That's where you load the shit," he said. And, "I need some tape."
They didn't have any tape, but Briar remembered that one of the seats in the van had a piece of duct tape on it, patching a rip, and she went out and peeled it off and brought it back inside, and Ranch pronounced it perfect. Using pliers, he made five small cuts in the aluminum screw-in base on the bulb, pushed the ragged tabs across the width of the bulb until they formed a small hole, and pushed a McDonald's straw into the hole and taped it in place.
"There you go," he said, holding up the bulb. "Best pipe in the world. You'll see."
Whitcomb took it, his hand shaking, looked at it, and said, "That's the greatest fuckin' thing I ever saw."
Even Briar was proud of Ranch.
Then George came.
George had the crank in little Ziploc baggies, and they bought three. Whitcomb, eyes narrowed, cracked one of the baggies, said, "Pretty fuckin yellow."
"It's right out of the coffeepot," George said. He was a short fat man with short black curly hair, most of it sticking out of the neckline of a Vikings T-shirt; and he wore cargo shorts and Nike shoes. "Just come out that way, but I got no dissatisfied customers. It's good shit."
Whitcomb dampened a finger with his tongue, stuck the finger in the bag, picked up a schmear of the crank, tasted it and winced: the taste was bitter, cutting, perfect. No sugar, no salt, no baking soda.
"Okay." He passed over the money; George looked at each bill, then tucked it in his side pocket. "Call me."
"How's business?" Ranch asked, his eyes on the baggies in Whitcomb's hands.
"Shit. Republicans don't want nothing from me," George said. "They go for the high-end stuff, no fuckin' redneck drippin's."
"This shit's better than coke," Whitcomb said. "It's like somebody sticks a fuckin' knife in your brain."
George bobbed his head and said, "Party on, men," and he was gone. George was a teetotaler.
Crank-enough of it-affected Whitcomb the way a paddle affects a Ping-Pong ball. They loaded the GE crank pipe with a spoon of the stuff, melted it down with a Bic lighter, watched it bubble and then begin to smoke. Whitcomb took the first hit, closing his eyes, letting it scream into him ' He and Ranch blew smoke at each other for a while, long snakes of black lung-leavings that held together in the air like dirigibles, and then, after a while, like the Hin denburg, fell apart. Then Ranch ripped off his shirt, backed against a wall and sat down, his eyes going goofy and red, into zombie mode, shaking with the intensity of it; but Whitcomb began crashing around in the chair, pumping with one arm, then the other, and then both, crashing into walls, chairs, the table, singing, "Oh, Black Betty, Bam-a-Lam," the words all screwed up, "Black Betty got fat lips, Bam-a-Lam," the "Bam-a-Lam" punctuated by a variety of impacts as he ricocheted around the two rooms and the bathroom that he could get at.
They went back to the pipe again, and again, and again '
Then Letty called.
Ranch got the phone again, because, again, it was under his head, as he lay facedown on the beanbag chair; he had death in a corner, and was pushing on it, hard. Then the phone rang, and his life was saved.
"Lo?"
Whitcomb, the comet, hurtled out of the kitchen and shouted, "Fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you…"
Ranch listened for a moment, then said, "… this ain't Randy…"
He gave Briar a peculiar look and struggled to his feet, got in front of Whitcomb and caught the chair and when Whitcomb screamed at him, he put his face an inch from Whitcomb's and howled back, until Whitcomb stopped, and then he said, "Bitch needs to talk to you, and you needs to talk to her."
"Yeah?" Whitcomb took the phone and said, "This is me? Who's this?"
He listened, then looked at the phone, and then at Briar, then tossed the phone in the corner and said to Briar, "Bitch says you been talking to Davenport."
"No," she said, but there was a lie in her eyes, somewhere, and Whitcomb saw it.
"Don't tell me "no," bitch, I can see you lyin'." Whitcomb's face was purple with rage and the crank. "Get down. Get down, bitch. Ranch, don't let this bitch out, she been talking to the cops…"