Roder shut the door in his face. Out of reach, not fifty feet from where he stood, in a drawer in Roder’s bedroom, were three ounces of weed, schoolyard in quality but adequate to the task at hand, and he couldn’t even blame the cosmos. It was he who’d offended Roder. By proposing a deal today, he’d rendered glaring a fact heretofore overlookable in the bonhomie of being high, of Roder’s generosity and his own capacity to amuse. The fact was that he didn’t love Roder. He loved drugs.
Pursued by the crater’s edge, he made his way to First Reformed. Of the friends of his who might be holding, only Roder wasn’t in Crossroads, and so the concert was his only recourse. His mother had lost her mind. She’d been committed to a loony bin, her father had drowned himself, and she’d named these facts to Perry—named two outcomes that had lurked behind doors in his head which he’d never permitted himself to open, not even on the most sleepless of nights. And yet, as if with X-ray vision, telekinetic intelligence, he must have seen through the shut doors, because nothing she’d told him had surprised him. He’d had only a dull sense of recognition. The outcomes were ugly but not shocking; he knew their faces.
He would tell her nothing more. Not now, not ever. In a sense, the crater he was fleeing was his mother.
He’d hoped to find a party in the church parking lot, but he’d arrived too late—the lot was empty. Inside the function hall, at the rear margin of the crowd, a couple of Crossroads alumnae were dancing with a blissy sloppiness to the instrumental jam in “Wooden Ships,” performed by a band Perry recognized by general repute, and also from having silk-screened its name on the concert posters, as the Bleu Notes. Through shifting lanes in the crowd, he caught glimpses of the fabled Laura Dobrinsky frowning over an electric keyboard, studious in her syncopations, and a tall Afro’d guitarist vaguely moving his lips to his riffing, and Tanner Evans behaving more like a rock star, tossing his hair and making little lunges as he whaled away on rhythm. They sounded note for note like Crosby, Stills and Nash on their first record, and the crowd, unfortunately, was totally into it. Except for the dancing girls, all he could see was the backs of nodding heads. Disappointment was rising in his throat when someone touched him on the shoulder.
Of all the useless people, it was Larry Cottrell. Larry had done something dumb to his hair, overcombed it, and the result was to make everything else about him—jean jacket, straight-legged corduroys, hiking boots—seem similarly overconsidered. He spread his arms as if, Jesus Christ, he expected a hug. Perry turned toward the stage and craned his neck, pretending to be greatly interested in the band. Having admitted to his mother that he’d been a dealer, and thereby inoculated himself against paternal discovery, he no longer had anything to fear from Larry.
We are lea-ea-ving, came the refrain onstage. You don’t nee-ee-eed us.
Larry, undiscouraged, shouted into Perry’s ear. “Where were you?”
As in a game of chess, Perry saw that, unless he took bold action, his little pawn would be dogging him at every turn, complicating the task of finding drugs. Again the sense of cosmic unfairness. Again the recognition that he had no one but himself to blame.
What to do? A bold move came to him as it did on a chessboard, with a frisson of do-I-dare. He beckoned Larry to follow him, which Larry eagerly did, out into the deserted vestibule.
“I had a thought,” he said.
“What, what,” Larry said.
“We need to get drunk.”
Larry’s fingers went straight to the sebaceous sides of his nose. “Okay.”
“I assume your mother has a liquor shelf?”
The fingers rubbed. The nose sniffed sebum. The eyes were wide.
“I want you to go there now,” Perry said. “Take something she won’t notice, triple sec or crème de menthe. Any bottle that’s more or less full.”
“Yeah, um. What about the rules, though?”
“You can hide the bottle in a snowdrift—it won’t freeze. Will you do that for me?”
Larry was obviously scared. “You have to come with me.”
“No. Too suspicious. You can take however long it takes—I’ll wait.”
“I don’t know about this.”
Perry grasped the arms of his pawn and looked into his eyes. “Just do it. You’ll thank me for it later.”
To observe his power over Larry was to push back the edge of the crater. There was a kind of liberation in jettisoning all thought of being a good person. From the outer doorway, he watched Larry hustle across the parking lot.
While Laura Dobrinsky, now seated at the church’s baby grand piano, belted out a Carole King song, he returned to the crowd and maneuvered through it, stopping for a hug from a Crossroads girl who’d confessed to being awed by his vocabulary, and a hug from a girl who’d challenged him to be more emotionally open, and a hug from a girl with whom he’d improvised a skit about the hazards of dishonesty, to much approbation, and a hug from a girl who’d vouchsafed to him, in a dyad, that she’d gotten her first period before she turned eleven, and then a thumbs-up from the boy who’d helped him with the concert posters, and a friendly nod from no less an eminence than Ike Isner, whose face he’d once palpated, while blindfolded, in a trust exercise, and whose blind fingers had then palpated his own face. None of these people could see inside his cranium, all had been fooled into applauding his emotional candor and collectively propelling him, with a kind of gently pulsing group action, like macroscopic cilia, in the direction of belonging to the Crossroads inner circle. The hugs in particular were still pleasant, but the edge of the crater was creeping up on him again, now taking the form of a classic depressive question: What was the point? The inner circle had no actual power. It was merely the goal of an abstract game.
Near the corner of the stage, by an American flag, which the church for unknowable reasons felt obliged to display on a pole, he found all his old friends in one tight group. Bobby Jett and Keith Stratton were there with David Goya and his ill-complected girlfriend, Kim, and also Becky, by whose side stood an older man, unfamiliar to Perry, lavishly sideburned and wearing a belted orange leather coat, who might have stepped off the set of The Mod Squad. Kim promptly hugged Perry, and he was pleased to detect a whiff of skunk in her hair. Where there was dope, there was hope. Becky only waved to him, but not unkindly. She looked taller to him somehow, radiantly okay, as if to accentuate his own runtiness, his galloping not-okayness.
Onstage, Tanner Evans had taken up an acoustic guitar, his Afro’d friend a banjo, and the Bleu Notes had rolled into a theologically tendentious ballad whose lyrics were known to Perry, because it was the semiofficial theme song of Crossroads, purportedly written by Tanner Evans himself, and was often sung at the end of Sunday-night meetings.
The song is in the changes not the notes
I was looking for a thing
Couldn’t find it in myself
Until I met somebody else
And I found it in between
Yeah, the song is in the changes not the notes
Becky seemed enthralled by the performance, the sideburned modster possibly a bit enthralled with Becky, but David Goya, who enjoyed amending the line I found it in between to I found it between her legs, was gazing at the crowd like a deaf old man puzzled by visual evidence of sound. Perry tugged on his sleeve and led him out into the hallway.
“Are you holding?” he said.
In the hallway light, Goya’s eyes were bloodshot, his expression wistful. “Sadly, I am not.”
“Then who is? If I may ask.”
“At this late hour, I couldn’t tell you. Demand was early and brisk.”
“David. Did you think I wasn’t coming?”
“What can I say? Events have taken their course. And now, yes, all pockets are empty. You should have been here with your sister.”
“My sister?”
“Is there a problem? Do we not like Becky?”
Something evil, the edge of the crater, was nipping the undersides of Perry’s heels. Evide
ntly, despite the recent forward stride in relations with his sister, the cessation of hostilities, her larger project of dispossessing him was ongoing.
“Apropos of which,” Goya said. “Were you aware that she’s with Tanner Evans? Did you know this and not tell us?”
Perry stared at the brass handles of the doors to the function hall, behind which the Bleu Notes were doing better justice to “The Song Is in the Changes” than was done on Sunday nights.
“We have eyewitness reports of smooching,” Goya said. “Kim is—what’s the word. Kim is agog.”
Down down down. Perry was going down.
“Can we go to your house?” he said. “I was—that is … Can we do a resupply run?”
“There’s talk of pancakes,” Goya said. “Becky wants midnight pancakes, and who could blame her? Kim’s going. And whither Kim goest…”
“We could catch up with them later.”
The desperate edge in Perry’s voice seemed to cut through Goya’s mellowness. His eyes, though red, became alert. “Is something up with you?”
The cosmos was unjust. By dallying in conversation with his mother, Perry had made himself too late to procure relief from the disturbance the conversation had caused him, whereas, if he’d skipped the conversation and come to the concert earlier, when drugs were still available, he wouldn’t have been disturbed and could have stuck to his resolution.
“I just,” he said. “I, uh. Is—who’s going?”
“Kim, Becky, me. Tanner, too, I think. Maybe others.”
Perry saw an idea and pounced on it. “The band has to pack up. If we go right now, we’ll be back in plenty of time.”
The idea was rational and easily realized, but Goya was too stoned or too stubborn to see it. “Is something wrong?”
“No. No.”
“Then let’s not do this.”
A tremendous closing cheer went up in the function hall. Goya turned and went back in, and Perry, after a hesitation, followed. One might have expected an encore, but Laura Dobrinsky was hopping down from the stage. She lowered her head and charged into the crowd, jostling Perry as she hurried out the door. Over his shoulder, he saw her sprinting down the hallway.
The house lights had come up, and Tanner Evans, too, was in the crowd, his hair damp with musical exertion. He shook the modster’s hand and draped his arm around Becky. Perry couldn’t see her face, but he could see the few people who’d hugged him, the many who hadn’t. Every one of them was looking at his sister, who had both arms around Tanner Evans. She’d been in Crossroads for less than two months, and already, it was clear, she’d leaped past Perry and advanced to the center of it.
How happy her soul must have been with the person in whom it had chanced to land.
From the ensuing blackness in his head, he’d returned to himself on Pirsig Avenue, walking with apparent intention toward the Shell station. In his wallet were twenty-three dollars, currently earmarked for Christmas presents for Becky, Clem, and the Reverend, but the world wouldn’t end if he spent only a few dollars on each of them. He also had coins in the flat, clear-plastic coin purse that Judson had given him for his birthday. Reaching the gas station, he took a dime from the purse and put it in the frigid pay phone by the restrooms. Behind him, in the snow, a tow truck idled with its roof lights flashing, no driver at the wheel. The phone number, 241–7642, was a cinch to remember, the fourth digit being the sum of the first three, which also recurred in the decimal inverse of the fourth, and the concluding two-digit number being the product of the two foregoing integers.
The guy answered on the sixth ring. Perry got no further than pronouncing his first and last names when the guy interrupted him. “Sorry, man. Closed for the holidays.”
“It’s something of an emergency.”
The guy hung up on him.
At this point, Perry might wisely have conceded defeat and gone back to First Reformed to content himself with whatever bottle Larry Cottrell had managed to poach, but Larry’s success was by no means assured, perhaps more like the opposite, and Perry had money, the guy had drugs—what could be simpler?
He’d been to the guy’s house only once, not to cop but simply to be introduced to him by a disagreeable upperclassman, Randy Toft, who’d been Keith Stratton’s dealer. Subsequent guy–Perry meetings had occurred among potholes in the parking lot behind the old A&P, which was boarded up but not yet demolished or repurposed, and had invariably involved lengthy waiting for the guy’s anonymous white Dodge to nose into view, Perry stewing about his lack of punctuality but never brave enough, when the guy finally arrived, to raise the issue. Both of them knew who had the power and who didn’t.
The house was easy to find again, because it was on a dead-end street by the cheerful name of Felix and its street-side mailbox bore a weathered NIXON AGNEW bumper sticker, possibly humor, possibly a red herring for the township police, or possibly, who could say, a heartfelt statement. As Perry came up the street named Felix toward the rail embankment, he saw the white Dodge in the driveway, buried in whiter snow. Light showed around the edges of sagging shades in the house’s living-room windows. The front walk was unshoveled, altogether untrodden.
Resolved: that embracing badness accords power.
Because what else, the first affirmative speaker asked rhetorically, distinguishes the person who needs to score from the person who needs to sell? The buyer, after all, is as free to withhold money as the seller is free to withhold his goods. Doesn’t it follow that the difference in power must relate to the gravity of the offense? A high-school dealer is nothing worse than a dispersing nozzle on a hose, dispensing good times to his peers and to himself, whereas the man who makes a career of being the hose has chosen to flout stern federal statutes. He’s morally far worse than the young dealer, and this is why the latter silently endures the former’s lack of punctuality. The deeper you go into badness, the more formidable you become.
Empowered by the shittiness of what he’d done to Larry Cottrell, Perry opened the guy’s chain-link gate and waded through the snow to the door, behind which he heard music. Before he could knock, there came a kind of strangled howl from a dog he’d forgotten about until this moment, followed by a cascade of savage basso barks, as the dog found the breath it had lacked for its initial howl. On Perry’s only other visit to the house, the dog had stood in the open doorway, large and short-haired, slit-eyed with suspicion, its jaw muscles grotesquely bulging, while the guy met him and Randy Toft outside the gate and put his arms on their shoulders, demonstrating amity, which the dog had grudgingly conceded. Now the barking caused the porch light to come on. Through the door, he heard the guy shouting.
“What are you doing, man, it’s out of control! The dog is out of control! You better just get the fuck away from here! It’s nobody’s business!”
The door had a fish-eye peephole through which Perry felt sure he was being observed. Even discounting for a distributor’s understandable paranoia, the situation didn’t seem promising, but he thought it was worth trying to signal his harmlessness before he gave up. He fished out his wallet, removed his twenty-dollar bill, and dangled it at the peephole.
“What are you doing to me?” the guy shouted, over the barking. “Wrong house, man! Go away!”
To make his intention clear, Perry mimed taking a toke.
“Yeah, I get it! Go away!”
Perry made a beseeching gesture, and the porch light went out. This seemed to be the end of it, but the door suddenly opened. The guy was wearing only blue jeans, neither buttoned nor zipped, and had his fingers under the collar of the outraged dog, which was scratching at the air with raised forelegs. “What are you doing?” he said. “What are you standing there for? You can’t be standing there. What do you think I am?”
He dragged the lunging dog back from the door. Extremely warm air was flowing out.
“Shut the fucking door already!”
Taking this as an invitation, Perry entered and closed the door. The guy was str
addling the dog as if it were a canine pony, hauling it farther back into the house while Perry waited on the entry rug, the snow on his rubbers immediately liquefying. The house temperature was a good ninety degrees. The music, which came from a wooden stereo console, was Vanilla Fudge. Perry remembered neither the console nor anything else about the living room, partly because the walls were bare and the furniture nondescript, but mainly because he’d been too agitated, too full of anxiety and shame, to pay attention. The guy, that afternoon, the previous April, had introduced himself as “Bill,” but his smirking intonation had led Perry to assume that Bill wasn’t his real name. He had a reddish mustache too large for his face, and one of his legs was an inch or two shorter than the other. According to Randy Toft, the leg had kept him out of Vietnam, but the guy didn’t seem to have much going for him otherwise. Namelessness suited his station in life.
A door slammed, and the dog howled more forlornly. The guy returned with his jeans still open, the zipper skewed by the differential in his leg lengths. His chest was nearly as hairless as Perry’s, but he was much furrier below the navel. He looked around the room, at everything but Perry, with jerky motions of his head, as though seeking the source of a threat. Seeming to find it in the stereo, he lifted the needle from the record with a shaking hand. There was a sickening sound of needle droppage, scratched vinyl. He raised the needle again and moved it safely aside. His head nodding rapidly, he stood and considered what he’d done.
“So,” Perry said carefully, for it was obvious that the guy was seriously amped on something, “I apologize for disturbing you—”
“Can’t do, can’t do, can’t do,” the guy said, staring at the turntable. “Nothing in the house, man, they fucked me over, why are you here?”
“I was hoping you might set me up.”
“You definitely shouldn’t be here—I don’t like it.”
“I’m aware of that, and I apologize.”
“You’re not listening. I’m saying I don’t like it. You know what I’m saying? I’m not talking about the thing, I’m talking about the thing behind the thing, the thing behind the thing behind the thing. You know what I’m saying?”
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