Just as dope could become cash, Bauhaus could be changed by a bullet or two. Either way, such changes might mean freedom, she thought.
Might they not?
SEVENTEEN
'Well, lookee here what the dawg drug in…'
Bash was flipping an X-Acto knife in the air, trying to see how many times he could get it to somersault and still catch the end that didn't have a point on it. He stopped to swig half the contents of his Twilight Zone coffee mug, then spent some time trying to guess why Jonathan looked so wrung out.
'Lemme see. No, don't tell me; I know this one…' He was turned up too loud and wrapped too tight. 'She told you she was from Salinas and it was her first time in the big city, and normally she never considered doing stuff like this, but you know how it is when you run out of money, and-'
'And Merry Exmas to you, too.' Jonathan's voice was crawling up from the back of this throat this morning. 'Ho. Ho. Ho.' He slumped behind his light table. All his rubber dinosaurs forgave him. The world is your squeak toy, they lied.
'You okay?' Bash shifted to Big Brother mode, just concerned enough not to go mushy. 'If you ain't sperm crazy then you look hammerstruck, Dino Boy.'
Jonathan grunted. The room refused to resolve into focus. Jessica waved hello from the hallway as she bustled off to xerox something. Always in a hurry to reproduce. He was thankful that her workload kept her from seeing how wasted he was this morning. Or maybe she knew, and was permitting him to save face. He had no mouth for storytelling, not even for Bash.
He told Bash anyway.
He started with his apology, for returning the truck late. He knew Bash would tell him sorries were unnecessary. He made a pallid grab at losing the morning in work. It was difficult to see what purpose all this ant-like industry served. When you completed a job another sat right down in its place. You had to have reservations just to catch a breath. Jobs had backed up. Bash was in his face.
He tried truce mode. 'You know when you feel the need to explain something? And it's something you shouldn't really be talking about in the first place, except that it's so big you can't keep it to yourself, you can't contain it all without bursting?'
'Cammy frequently complains that I'm so big she can't contain all of me without -'
'Yeah, right. Well. What happened last night was sort of like that.'
'Let's haggle.' Bash grinned. Frankenstein's Monster: Gooood. 'Give me juicy tidbits. Edited highlights. And I'll pull some of that small shit off your desk so you can preserve your sterling rep around here, since you look like you're about to faint and put out an eye on a compass point.'
Jonathan was in no mood to play tough; he genuinely needed the help. Take the proofing,' he said, handing across a stack of sheets. 'I track the words but they don't mesh into anything meaningful.' Layout seemed more accessible. Cutting and pasting the paper maelstrom into a juxtaposition with straight lines; smacking disorder on the side of the head and making it behave. Bash battened gleefully on tales of police raids, naked prostitutes, mayhem in the snowy night. Jonathan veered around most of the drug stuff, and was yanked under by a shock flash of recall that reminded him of several straw-fulls of pharmaceutical chuckle dust still assuming squatter's rights in his parka. There now. The thought stole his wind like a rabbit punch to the sternum.
'Gas pain?' said Bash. 'Your face just went as blank as a Butt Person's brain scan.'
'Tired.' He wanted his sinuses to drain and his brain pan to stabilize. How much had he drunk yesterday? Had he gotten round to eating? Would any damned thing take the dead lead out of his buns this fine, blinding-bright Illinois morning?
The thing really clogging up his head was Jamaica. All sass and steel and aerodynamic curves, a cherished memory permabound in a rectangular bloc of blue water, eyes Hinting green and streetwise, motions fluid and sensuous, tongue scalding, then, to Jonathan, merciful.
Her mouth engorged with five stubby inches of beet-red Bauhaus bratwurst.
Tougher now, to moon over Amanda. She was gaining a sepia tint, spoiling on the shelf of his memories. Amanda was passing from the ripe blush of guilt and recriminations into the decay of old news.
Senses blunted, he had shuffled away from Bauhaus' bad pad, unable to encompass any more weirdness for one twenty-four hour slot. By ramming his dick into Jamaica's face the overweight drug lord was making some kind of power point. By permitting such a gross violation, she was acceding to some unknown politic. Bauhaus held some Damoclean blade over Jamaica's life, and thus, the privilege to part her bee-stung lips with his crooked little chimp-choker.
Jamaica would have an explanation. Hope broad-jumped eternally.
And through it all, Jonathan thought: Who are you, to judge? While he didn't have to judge, he decided he didn't have to witness, either. He took his money, ran, and hoped Jamaica did likewise after paying her own bills.
Truck back to Kenilworth. Keys to door. Head to a pillow still simmering in her spicy scent. Autonomic actions all, prefacing two hours of sickly sleep. No rest. When his faithful travel alarm blew reveille he rose, no more sentient than a coffee-swilling robot. For the first time he noticed the trail of blood on the hopeless carpet.
He had booted out the black cat… jesus, decades ago.
The pawprints in the blood were still fresh enough to glisten. Definitely cat feet. Passage had occurred while Jonathan was sleeping. The red swath commenced low to the wall next to the wheezy steam heater and meandered past the cot. Jonathan had tracked it to the bathroom. From the smears and skids he pictured the cat's bloody progress: A slippery leap from the closed toilet lid to the edge of the bathtub and thence to the windowsill. Presumably it had hooked its claws into the cardboard sealing off the broken window. Presumably it had slid into the airshaft, seeking edibles, and gotten a long surprise tumble down to a full-stop impact fraught with pain and broken cat bones. Jonathan had popped the cardboard out. It was still stained by the fecal grease, which had dried and crusted now like burned pie filling. He had called into the shaft. No meows. The worst was feared, but without a light, what could he have done?
And he still had no idea of what had become of Cruz.
'I love stuff like that,' Bash enthused. 'Like having the Enquirer read to you. Except it's all so rich you couldn't have possibly tall-taled it together.' He was not completely serious, and his face reflected a snap or two of doubt. 'I suppose you cleaned all the blood and stuff up?'
'No time. I didn't want Capra to get pissed at me for being late. By now it's dry. I wonder what happened to that goddamned cat?'
'Gone to cat hell.'
He peeled up angular hanks of masking tape and worked over his job with an eraser to eliminate a few errant thumbprints. He preferred working with the table's underlight on so that he could see how his pasteup aligned in terms of silhouettes - dark, darker, darkest - as well as hewing to the longitudes and latitudes of the photo-blue graph. Without work on the board the light was too strong. He moved the next job in his stack into position.
'You don't suppose Capra would miss one of those highpowered garage flashlights for a day or two, do you?'
'You going to check out the shaft tonight, bro?'
Jonathan tried to work moisture into his dry lips, feeling skin cracks with his tongue, which was just as arid. 'Damnation,' Bash went on. 'I'd do it with you, but 'Camela?' That's a big ten-four. We're in what you might call the negotiation phase.'
'What happened?'
'She did the one thing my get-rid-of-Cammy campaign never counted on, swabbie. She went and started being nice to me. No naggery, no face powder and eyebrows all over the bathroom sink.' He lowered his voice, aware that the subject of his discourse lurked in this selfsame building, and who knew what walls had ears? 'She's dropping weight like crazy. In another week she'll be able to slide into one of those evening sheaths that drove me so nuts in the first stretch of the race. She wants you to come to dinner tonight. She told me to tell you she promises no char. She bought me a hat.' He b
obbed his noggin in the direction of the coatrack, where hung a floppy, mustard-colored newsboy's cap.
'Maybe she's having an affair,' Jonathan said. 'Buying you presents to share the wealth.'
That squeezed a patronizing laugh out of his big friend. 'Or maybe she caught a case of multiple personality, and right now I'm living with Nice Cammy. Soon the Evil Anti-Cammy will manifest in a fart cloud of sulphur dioxide. I don't know which personality fucked me last night, but I will confide one lurid detail, no more: I think we should phone the Guinness Book, or Believe It Or Not!, because she banged me like a bullet train. I could barely hang on/ His broad Ed Norton grin levelled off. There was some other tasty bit he was keeping to himself. 'More coffee for you?'
By now Jonathan knew Bash's pattern. A peekaboo shot of sexual minutiae, just betwixt me and thee, pal o' mine. Behind the crude honesty he was hiding something else. He wanted Jonathan to know he was getting laid, but not the Bad Thing. There was something Jonathan was going to have to drag out of him. Jonathan decided to change the subject entirely, kidding himself that he was sparing Bash some embarrassment.
'Can't do me a Turbo here, can you?' A beer might go down better, but no, not here at work, dude.
Bash had hoisted the Pyrex pot, trying to see how high he could hold it and still hit his mug with a steaming arc of Colombian Supremo. When he finished, with a flourish as always, his cuffs were spattered and his coffee had a head on it.
The stuff was good, potent, newly brewed. To Jonathan it tasted like spitoonage.
He hit the bathroom and inventoried the melanotic bags under his eyes. They were puffy and insisted on some quality sleep time. He hesitated, bit his lip, and pulled the straw of cocaine out of his shirt pocket. He'd bent it double to fit it less obtrusively and the paper elbow had split, depositing a good two lines or so in the crease of his pocket. He did not care. He tapped out a pinch on the ridge of his hand, feeling like Dr Jekyll on the verge of quaffing his tainted potion. Stevenson had written Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in the 1880s, probably during his cocaine treatments for tuberculosis.
Let's see if the booster rocket hype of this stuff is all it's cracked up to be, he thought. Cracked. Ha-ha, he was wielding the jargon like a pro now, even making puns out of it.
Under cover of running water in the sink, he did two healthy toots and flushed the rest, straw and all, down the toilet. He washed his hands, dabbed at his mouth and face, then inhaled small jolts of water up his nose the way Jamaica had told him to.
It took ninety seconds for the hyperdrive to kick in, the way a tank of nitrous oxide can supercharge a race car. He remembered everything that needed doing, without using memos. He dive-bombed his work stack, polishing it off along with eight more cups of coffee.
'Never heard you hum music while you work before,' Bash said.
Jonathan laughed and shrugged it off. He could handle this land of efficiency, for sure.
This was easy to get to like.
The sight of Camela's new engagement diamond, over dinner, brought on a depression of Shakespearian overstatement. Jonathan found his gaze morbidly affixed to the ring that glinted from her betrothal finger. He stared blankly, not meaning to, the way ministers stare at a woman's breasts.
With his newsboy's cap on, Bash looked like a twelve-year-old with the world's most overactive thyroid.
Dinner was tarragon chicken with lots of fresh vegetables, a salad of butter lettuce with julienne bell pepper and jicama. Dessert was wide-topped goblets full of sliced strawberries in chocolated whipped cream. Bash marked Jonathan's oblique hold on the evening, sensed that a serious interview would come later, and otherwise ignored his friend's discomfort with a breezy, studied indifference.
Together they watched a rental tape of Amazon Women on the Moon. Camela laughed in all the right places. At ten she grandly excused herself, as she said, to 'retire.' She had worn a one-piece velvet wraparound with a plunging neckline and a broad, fancy belt. She had done the alterations and padded the shoulders herself, and in sum the outfit was meant to impress, showing off the assets of her resurging figure and expertly camouflaging the areas still chalked for restoration.
Bash laughed loud and long - at the movie, at Jonathan's occasional wisecracks, at nearly goddamn everything, reaching too hard to prove he was having a good time. He worked his way through a six pack of Quietly Beer, alternating with double-spiked Turbos, and determinedly crunched up at least fifty fortune cookies.
Hang on to your ideals. A man is known by his deeds.
Once Jonathan heard the fan come on in the bedroom, he scooted closer to Bash on the sofa, speaking low. 'Okay, man, just what the fuck is going on here?'
'Zit look like?' Bash was half-bagged.
'Just a couple of days ago you were shoveling shit about how Bash plus Camela equalled no way, Jose. If she'd have aimed that gold at my eyes any more I would've gotten sunstroke. Looks like your weekend was pretty goddamn eventful too, stud.'
Bash waved a hand dismissively, sloshing the contents of his half-empty Quiedy bottle into foam. 'Did I ever tell you why Cammy came to Chicago? Not just to waste her life jumping from one idiot secretarial gig to another.'
'You told me you guys linked up after her fiance dumped her.'
'Ahum. Well, the nub of our gist, chilluns, is this: She stays poor and on her own as long as she stays single. Her mission, Jimbo, should she decide to accept it, is to return to Mommy and Daddy in Iowa, how shall we say, spoused.' His Louisiana accent came out of hiding and made every other word strange and new-sounding, drowned in noble deep-South honeydew. 'Spoused. Then Mommy and Daddy give her the three-bedroom in the moneybelt suburbs, two matching Volvos, and one whole year to honeymoon wherever their one and only's heart desires.' He said dee-czars.
'What are her parents into?' Jonathan had begun fiddling with Bash's modified Magic 8-Ball.
'Computer keyboard manufacture. Third largest in America.' He was startitag to have difficulty with the harder consonants, and took a shot at rinsing the blur from his speech with a slug of Quietly swished around like mouthwash. 'Now your ordinary mortals might opine: Geez, guy, you're kinda selling out, ain'tcha?'
'That crossed my mind, yeah.'
'You got it. Invasion of the Mega-Butt Peoples. But just between you 'n' me, Jonathan… I am thirty-fucking-four-fucking years old, this year. And you know what? I think I could use a year off, bought and paid for. And I think there ain't nothing you can do by marriage that you can't undo by divorce.'
The 8-Ball's two cents worth surfaced: Bite My Packed Shorts.
Bash sounded morbid and ingrown, craving exterior reassurances for his less than noble charter. Jonathan felt clear-headed, able-bodied and in control - like he'd felt in the wake of his premier blast of toot-sweet - but very tired, very old. He patted the nearest of Bash's sloping shoulders and felt knots.
'Hey, man, it isn't for me to vote yea or nay. I mean, just look at how fucked up my life is-'
Bash nailed him, shiny-eyed. 'Don't start that shit about Amanda again. I ain't in no mood, bro.'
'I wasn't going to.'
'You were. Fucking were.' He drew breath faster, a bull pawing and snorting, amping toward charge and crush and bright gushings of crimson. 'Man, when are you going to just admit that Amanda… all that pain and bullshit you put yourself through… is just… '
'Shh, cool it, just calm down, okay?' It was scary to see Bash in such a state - defanged, unboisterous, less than positive. Like lifting Apollo's toga and finding a pea pod penis, below even human average.
'Listen to me. Maybe it's you, Bash-man. Maybe you did it, helped make Camela better, or helped her get closer to her own optimum vision of herself. That's not a bad thing. Jesus- so you might have helped somebody; how could that be bad? You sure as hell have helped me more times than I deserve. I might have taken the high dive years ago if you hadn't been around. My other so-called fucking friends sure faded into the baseboards; to hell with 'em. You told me you'd be there for me
and the difference was that you were. And friends don't ever tell friends that. They tell everybody else, at funerals, when it's too late and it doesn't matter a damn.'
Jonathan knew he was babbling, stringing phrases, grabbing for superficial logic. But his performance had enough surface tension to keep Bash from slopping over into big, ripe tears. If for some reason he started crying, Jonathan was afraid they'd both lose it.
'But I'm here because you gave a shit, man, and so I'm here to tell you right now that your life is yours. And if you want my opinion, it's yours, and if you don't, that's fine too. I'll defend whatever you decide, because I love you, man. Anything else is just a fix. Right?'
Bash swallowed and nodded. Jonathan was unaware whether he had just done any good, or which of them was more purged. The emotion passed with the moment, and ten minutes later Bash had slumped into the corner crook of the sofa and was snoring softly.
Jonathan pursed his lips. No use in talking to his knees, or his hands. Masturbation was out. The dinner dishes had already been done. Efficiently, too.
He whispered into the kitchen phone, tip-toed to the door, and caught a cab back to Kenilworth. When he stepped into the fresh snowpack the night cold hit his bare face as hard as a swung plank. He brought the depression home with him. It was more than clinical; it was classic, settling its weight onto his spine and belaboring his temples like an invisible cartoon stormfront. The blue triangle hovering in the mystic fluid of Bash's magic 8-Ball stayed with Jonathan, too. He saw it bumping against the round window and thought of a corpse floating up to the porthole of a sunken ship.
Kill Yourself, Slug Snot.
The funk refused to dissipate. He needed sleep. He overpaid the cabbie and slumped inside to find some.
EIGHTEEN
Late night in Oakwood.
Edgar Ransome heard the taxi's snow treads mashing through street slush. When the car door chunked shut outside his ground floor window he parted the eastward drapes for a look-see. He was Kenilworth Arms' unofficial sentry-without-portfolio, and his vigilance permitted him to maintain a passing mock of security. He did his part, though no one else ever suspected. His vision was crackeijack: he could see individual motes of backed-up dust sifting floorward from the disturbed curtains, even the white lines of dry dermis delineating the print pad of the finger he used to part them. He memo'ed the identity of the cab's passenger as one of those new kids from upstairs, the one who had moved in a day or three ago.
The Shaft Page 20
