Dipe laughed. “He’s a growing boy. You remember growing, right, LeClerc?” This was a reference to LeClerc’s ballooning gut. The stranger laughed. Or rather snickered. The gloom lifted momentarily.
“Go on into the kitchen, Walter,” Dipe was saying. “Stick your head in the refrigerator, go through the cupboards — you’re welcome to anything I’ve got, you know that.”
Walter was already in the hallway when the stranger called out, “Bring me back some peanuts or something, will you?”
The first think he saw on opening the refrigerator door was a six-pack of Budweiser. He didn’t want beer, not exactly, but he popped one and drained it anyway. Beside the beer were the remains of the apple pie — nearly half of it, in fact — still in its baking dish. Walter made short work of it. In the meat compartment he found half a pound of pastrami, a rock-hard fragment of Parmesan and six thin pink slices of roast beef in an Offenbacher’s bag. Before he knew what he was doing, he had the whole mess in his mouth and was washing it down with another beer. He was reaching for the glossy bright can of whipped cream, thinking to squirt some of it down his throat, when Mardi walked in on him.
“Oh, uh, hi,” he said, guiltily closing the refrigerator door. He held a beer in one hand, and, somehow, a jar of marinated artichoke hearts had appeared in the other.
“What’s happening?” Mardi said, laconic, her eyes wide and amused, yet a bit blunted too. She was wearing a flesh-colored body stocking, no brassiere, cowgirl boots. Her raccoon coat and woolen scarf were thrown over one arm. She reeked of pot. “Pigging out, huh?”
Walter set the beer down to unscrew the lid of the jar. He fished out a couple of artichoke hearts with his fingers and wedged them in his mouth, dabbing with the back of his hand at the oil dribbling down his chin. “I’m hungry,” he said simply.
“Why don’t you just move in?” she said in a breathy whisper. “Take my room.” She opened the refrigerator and took a beer herself.
From across the house came the rumble of lamentation and the muffled but unmistakable tones of LeClerc Outhouse affirming an unheard proposition: “Damn straight!”
Walter couldn’t help himself. He finished the artichoke hearts — there were only about twelve of them — and, still chewing, tilted back the jar and drank off the thick, herb-flavored olive oil in which they’d been preserved.
Mardi pulled the short-necked bottle from her lips and gave him a look of mock horror. “Disgusting,” she said.
Walter shrugged, and went for the crullers in the bread box.
She watched him eat a moment, then asked him how Alaska was.
“You know,” he said between mouthfuls, “cold.”
There was a silence. The voices from the parlor became more animated. Joanna, hugely pregnant Joanna, passed by in the hallway in a silk dressing gown. Her skin was white, her hair upswept in a conventional coif. She wasn’t even wearing moccasins.
“What’s going on in there,” Mardi asked, indicating the parlor with a jerk of her head, “—they plotting something or what?”
Walter shrugged. He was considering the half loaf of thin-sliced whole wheat bread he’d found beside the crullers. Peanut butter? he was thinking. Or pimento cream cheese?
Suddenly Mardi had hold of his arm and she was leaning into him, brushing his cheek with her own. “Want to go upstairs for a quickie?” she breathed, and for a minute, just a minute, he stopped chewing. But then she pushed away from him with a laugh—“Had you, didn’t I? Huh? Admit it.”
He looked from the loaf in his hand to her breasts, her lovely, familiar breasts, the upturned nipples so well delineated she might just as well have forgone the body stocking. The hunger — the hunger of the gut, anyway — began to subside.
Mardi was grinning, poised to dodge away from him like a kid with a swiped cap or notebook. “Only kidding,” she said. “Hey, I’m on my way out the door.”
Walter managed to summon a “where to?” look, though at the moment he couldn’t have cared less.
“Garrison,” she said, “where else?” And then she was gone.
Walter stood there a long moment, listening to the voices drifting in from the parlor, listening to Dipe Van Wart, his employer, his mentor, his best and only friend. Dipe Van Wart, who’d molded his father into a piece of shit. He thought about that a moment longer, and thought about Hesh and Lola, Tom Crane, Jessica, the late lamented Peletiah, Sasha Freeman, Morton Blum, Rose Pollack. They were pieces of shit too. All of them. He was alone. He was hard, soulless and free. He was Meursault shooting the Arab. He could do anything, anything he wanted.
He put the bread back in the bread box and poured the rest of his beer down the drain. His coat was in the parlor, but he wouldn’t need it. He didn’t feel like going back in there now, and besides, it wasn’t cold — not when you’ve just come back from Barrow, anyway. He leaned against the counter and focused on the clock over the stove, forcing himself to wait until the second hand had circled it twice. It’s in the blood, Walter, he heard his father say. And then he crossed the kitchen and slipped out the back door.
The night assaulted him with silence. He stumped through the snow, fighting for balance, and caught himself on the fender of the car. When he fired up the engine and flicked on the lights, he could see the dark rectangle where Mardi’s car had been drawn up to the curb, and then the long trailing runners of her tire tracks sloping gracefully down the drive. And when he got to the bottom of the drive he saw that the tracks veered left, toward Garrison.
He could have turned right and gone home to bed.
But he didn’t.
Fifteen minutes later he was pulling into the commuter lot on the dim far fringes of the Garrison station. The lot was unpaved and untended, a dusty Sonoran expanse of sharp-edged rock and brittle weed. Tonight it was white, smooth, perfect. Cars lined the single street in front of the station and there were another fifty or so in the lot, but they were close in, beneath the station lights. Walter chose to go beyond them, to blaze his own path. He wanted to be inconspicuous.
The MG had good traction, but he could feel the wheels slipping out from under him. Hidden obstacles were giving him a roller coaster ride, the visibility was about the same whether he had his eyes open or not and the rear end seemed to have a will of its own: before he knew it he was sunk in a crater deep enough to swallow a school bus. Furious, he gunned the accelerator. The rear wheels whined, the chassis shuddered beneath him. He slammed it into reverse, gunned it, rammed it back into first, gunned it again. Nothing. He kept at it for maybe ten minutes, gaining an inch on one run to lose it on the next.
Shit. He pounded the wheel in frustration. He didn’t even know why he’d come — it wasn’t to see Tom and Jessica, that was for shit sure, or Mardi either. In fact, he didn’t want to see anyone, or be seen either. And now he was stuck. Like an idiot. Enraged, he popped the clutch and gunned it again, and then he slammed his fist into the dash so hard he went through the odometer lens and slashed his knuckles. He was sucking at the wound and cursing, so frustrated he could cry, when someone rapped at the windshield.
A muffled figure stood there in the snow. Walter rolled down the window and saw a second muffled figure lurking behind the first. “Need help?” A guy with shaggy wet hair and a beard stuck his head in the window. For a moment Walter panicked, thinking it was Tom Crane, but then he recovered himself. “Yeah. Son of a bitch. There’s a pit or something here, feels like.”
“We’ll push,” the guy said. “Hit it when I yell.”