by Robert Stone
Hicks smiled and rested his cigar on the Portable Nietzsche.
“Tell me about we. I’ll bet it’s just you, you bastard.”
“How could it be just me?” Converse asked. “How?” He was about to look over his shoulder again. Hicks restrained him with a hand.
“I have reason to believe,” Converse said, “that this operation concerns the CIA.”
Hicks laughed in his face. Politely, he joined in the laughter.
“That’s folklore,” Hicks said.
“Certain individuals.”
Hicks tried to stare him down. It was not out of the question.
“Something else you better know,” Converse continued. “They know about you. They know you carry. Your name came up right away.”
“No,” Hicks said, after a moment. “You’re bullshitting me.”
“O.K.,” Converse said. “They know about you because I told them. In something like this, they have to know.”
“Oh, sure,” Hicks said. “I dig it.” He looked out over the darkened bay, gnawing his lip. “Something like this they’d have to know.” He looked back at Converse and found him feeling his forehead. “What are you doing to me?”
“Look,” Converse said quickly, “they absolutely will not bother you. You’re not supposed to know about them and they will not fuck with you if you deliver. Marge has twenty-five hundred bills for you. It’s as simple as that.”
Hicks was smiling again.
“If I deliver, right? But if I don’t deliver—if I take you off because I happen to know you’re an asshole—then the roof falls in, right? CIA time.”
“Exactly,” Converse said.
“If I were you and I wanted to keep a carrier honest, I might make up a bullshit story about the CIA. But I wouldn’t try to lay it on a buddy.”
Converse had begun to appear slightly upset.
“For God’s sake, Ray, what would I be doing in a score like this on my own? Where would I get the money?”
It occurred to Hicks that there would be absolutely nothing dishonorable in ripping him off. He would have brought it on himself. Perhaps he would think it was piquant.
“You’re terrific,” he told Converse. “I really can’t tell if you’re lying or not.”
“It doesn’t matter whether I’m lying or not. That’s the beauty of it. As it happens, I’m telling the truth.”
Hicks fidgeted in his chair.
“It’s a stupid expensive way to move weight. If the CIA needs the likes of you and me they’re not what they’re supposed to be.”
“Who is, these days?” Converse leaned forward in his chair; he seemed guileless. “Look, Ray—it’s certain people. Certain greedy people with CIA connections. They stand to make a tremendous profit and they can’t use their regular channels. They can afford good security. But they have to know who’s carrying for them beforehand.”
“Are you supposed to be good security?”
“No, no,” Converse said. “You. You are.”
Hicks was silent for a while.
“I think this sucks,” he said finally. “When I saw you last you were as skittish as a cooze, and now you’re an operator from the CIA.”
“You wanted to carry weight,” Converse said. “I got you weight.”
“I may just have to tell you no, buddy.”
Converse was trembling, and Hicks watched him with concern.
“Then we both go,” Converse said softly. “It’s too late for that.”
Hicks brushed aside the blue haze of his cigar and felt suddenly that he was trying to dispel more than cigar smoke. Converse’s fear was almost palpable. Hicks was impressed.
“You deliver,” Converse insisted, “and you split. You don’t wait for a meet. You just take your money.”
Hicks waited for him to go on.
“I’m a very timid person. I’m cautious. I’m a virtual paranoid. I’ve been around this place for a while and I know how this shit works. If it weren’t a really cool number I wouldn’t go near it.”
“I didn’t know you were such a money freak.”
Converse shrugged.
“I suppose it’s the way we’re brought up.”
“I thought you were a moralist. You and your old lady—I thought you were world-savers. How about all these teenyboppers OD-ing on the roof? Doesn’t that bother you?”
“We’ve dealt with the moral objections,” Converse said.
Hicks slumped down in his chair and leaned his chin on his fist, watching Converse.
“Let me tell you something funny,” he said. “I met Mary Microgram in Frisco last year.”
Mary Microgram was a girlfriend of Converse’s. They had parted bitterly.
“You know what she told me? She told me you said I was a psychopath.”
Converse looked chastened.
“It must have been some drunken piss-off. I really know better than that.”
Hicks laughed.
“You bad-mouth me. You threaten me with the fucking CIA and claim you turned me. Then when you need honesty and self-discipline you come to me.”
“When I was with Mary,” Converse said, “I was very fucked up.”
“It’s outrageous,” Hicks said. “I was hurt.”
A burst of automatic-weapons fire sounded from across the bay. Searchlights played on the water, sweeping the line of palms on the far shore. Converse turned wearily in the direction of the noise.
“Sappers?”
“There ain’t no sappers,” Hicks said. “It’s all a beautiful hoax.”
Why not, he thought. There was nothing else going down. He felt the necessity of changing levels, a little adrenalin to clean the blood. It was interesting and kind of scary. Converse and his old lady would be a scene; he had never seen her.
“I’ll carry your scag, John. But you better see I get treated right. Self-defense is an art I cultivate.”
Converse was smiling.
“I didn’t think there was ever much question about it.”
“No,” Hicks said.
Converse looked at the briefcase.
“You have anything you want in that case,” Hicks said, “take it with you now. Otherwise just leave like it is.”
“Just like that?”
“Like it is.”
Converse went downstairs and brought up two cans of beer and two large gin and tonics. When he had taken a sip of the cold drink, he began to tremble again.
“You’re mad,” Hicks told him, “a great mind—warped—twisted.”
It was an old movie line they had played with twelve years before in the Marine Corps.
Converse seemed particularly elated. He raised his glass.
“To Nietzsche.”
They drank to Nietzsche. It was adolescence. A time trip.
Another burst of fire came from the opposite shore.
“I better get back to the Oscar,” Converse said. “I’ll miss curfew.”
Hicks set his empty beer can down.
“What did you come here for? If I’m a psychopath, what are you?”
Converse was still smiling.
“I’m a writer. I wanted to see it.” His eyes followed the searchlights on the bay. “I suppose there was an element of guilt.”
“That’s ironic.”
“Yes,” Converse said. “It’s distinctly ironic.”
They fell silent for a while.
“I’m tired of being bothered,” Converse said. He rested his hand on the briefcase. “I feel like this is the first real thing I ever did in my life. I don’t know what the other stuff was about.”
“You mean you enjoy it?”
“No,” Converse said. “I don’t mean that at all.”
“It’s a funny place,” Hicks said.
“Let smiles cease,” Converse said. “Let laughter flee. This is the place where everybody finds out who they are.”
Hicks shook his head.
“What a bummer for the gooks.”
Converse look
ed at his watch and then rubbed his shoulders as if he were warming them.
“You can’t blame us too much. We didn’t know who we were till we got here. We thought we were something else.” He took a large swallow of gin and tonic. “Hey, did you hear about the elephants?”
Hicks smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “The poor elephants.”
“The poor elephants,” Converse said. They laughed together in the dark.
Converse’s face was as wet as if he had been immersed. The drink was making him sweat.
“It’s a Buddhist country. They must have a fantastic traffic in the transmigration of souls. Elephants and missionaries. Porpoises, sappers, lizards. Listen,” he said suddenly, “I’m cold. Is it cold?”
“It’s your fever. Go see the duty master-at-arms across the road. Maybe he can get you a ride to the gate.”
Converse stood up and turned his back on the briefcase.
“You’d better be careful,” Hicks told him. “It’s gone funny in the states.”
“It can’t be funnier than here.”
“Here everything’s simple,” Hicks said. “It’s funnier there. I don’t know who you’re running with but I bet they got no sense of irony.”
Converse stood over him, a bit unsteadily. He swung his arm in a broad gesture.
“As of now it can rain blood and shit,” he said. “I got nowhere to go.”
He walked down the wooden steps carefully. His sore right arm swung liberated; he felt gloriously free. As he reached the bottom step, it occurred to him that Hicks was probably a psychopath after all.
THE LAST MAN STOOD AT THE WINDOW, SQUINTING AS though he saw his life’s resolution off at a great distance, bathed in light. When the ticket popped out, he spread his thick fingers over the smooth metal surface of the dispenser and groped for it unseeing.
A true groper, Marge thought. His fingers sought the pink ticket like blind predatory worms; finding it, they came moistly together, pressed it down, and slid it out of sight over the ledge. Marge identified with the ticket.
Every once in a while, Marge would steal a glance at the faces of her customers but for the most part she watched their fingerwork.
The last man paused for a moment at the rear of the booth to peer downward through the glass. He had transferred the ticket to his left hand; the talented right was already in his trouser pocket. Marge was not alarmed. She realized that the man wanted to see her ass. But Marge had hung her sweater over the back of her chair so there was nothing to see. She had not done it out of spite but merely for convenience.
“C’mon, Jack,” Holy-o told the last man. Holy-o stood beside the tin doors and took tickets. He took the last man’s ticket, dropped the house stub in a wooden box, and closed the doors.
Holy-o had a truncheon in which he had carved designs—animal shapes and what he imagined to be the gods of his native Samoa. The truncheon hung by a leather thong from a screw eye in the oak ticket box. With the doors closed on the last man, Holy-o took his truncheon from its hook and stood out on the sidewalk in front of Marge’s booth, cradling the club in his hands like a riot policeman.
Marge and Holy-o were waiting for the fellas to arrive.
The fellas arrived within two minutes of the last man. They double-parked their Thunderbird directly in front of the box office and climbed out briskly. They were well-groomed, clean-shaven young men with olive complexions. They both wore khaki half coats and one of them had a peaked waterproof cap with a belt that buckled in the back.
“Hiya, Holy-o.” They came directly to the door of Marge’s booth.
“Hiya, fellas,” Holy-o said.
Marge opened up while the fellas looked the street over. Sometimes when they came, the fellas would see people whose appearance troubled them. If the troublesome-looking people were white, the fellas called them hard-ons. If they were black, they called them jigs. The fellas called the regular Third Street people and the customers of the theater mooches or mushes. Marge was never sure which.
“Hiya, sweetheart.” It was the one with the hat who carried the bag.
Marge slipped her cash drawer out of its place and locked it.
“Hi,” she said. She thought of him as Hat. Once when she had been really fucked up she had said, “Hi, Hat.” She had been so fucked up that night she had been shortchanging herself instead of the mooches. Or mushes.
Hat had just looked at her. “Oh,” he had said, “you like my hat?”
She followed Holy-o and the fellas into the darkened theater and they all went to Holy-o’s office to unlock Rowena and the candy-stand money. Holy-o kept Rowena and the candy money locked in his office until the fellas arrived. Until a year or so before, he had locked the candy complex up in the ladies’ room after the last film went on but ladies had started coming to the theater—things being what they were—and he had been compelled to leave the ladies’ room open.
Rowena stood with the candy till at her feet, pulling her green poncho about her shoulders as though she were cold. In fact, it was not at all cold in Holy-o’s office but it smelled strongly of the grass Rowena had been smoking.
“Hiya, sweetheart,” Hat said to Rowena.
Rowena was biting her lip, peering bemusedly through her square spectacles.
“Hiya,” she said and broke up. “Hiya, Hat.”
Rowena was really fucked up and, of course, Marge had told the story of what had happened the other night. Marge shook her head. Silly Rowena.
They spread the day’s gross on a sliding panel of Holy-o’s desk and the other fella counted it.
“What is this?” Hat asked Holy-o. “Everybody likes my hat.”
Holy-o shook his head in disapproval. Hat put the money in his bag.
“It’s just a hat,” he said. “It’s my hat.”
“Right on,” Rowena said happily.
Hat looked up at Holy-o, blinked and stared at her. The smiling Rowena turned from the blank eyes of Hat to the stern gaze of Holy-o and back.
“Right on?” Hat asked. “What’s right on? What do you mean, right on?”
“I mean right on,” Rowena said. “Just right on.” Her smile grew wider though less merry. “I don’t mean anything.”
“Right on,” Hat sang in falsetto as he carried the bag from the office. The other fella went with him. “Right on.” He was mimicking Rowena.
“G’night, fellas,” Holy-o said.
“G’night, Holy-o.”
Holy-o was displeased.
“What are you,” he demanded of Rowena, “dumb? What are you, stupid?” He waved his arms about to disperse the odor of grass. “And looka this place.”
“It’s just smoke,” Rowena said.
“You’re gonna put your job in jeopardy,” Holy-o told her.
For the last minutes of the film, Marge and Rowena stood behind the last row of seats. On the screen, long-haired young people were smoking grass and eating each other out between tokes. The night’s house was mercifully well-behaved, silent except for its hoarse expirations and a certain rustle of cloth. When the lights came on, the girls retired toward the door of Holy-o’s office; the mooches were filing up the middle aisle and the close presence of young women was sometimes difficult for them. Holy-o oversaw their going hence with his truncheon stuck in his breast pocket like a cigar.
When the room was clear, Holy-o checked out the ladies’ room to see that no mooches had secreted themselves there and Marge and Rowena locked themselves inside. Rowena went to the toilet and lit a joint.
“An awful lot of them are Chinese,” she said to Marge. “You notice that?”
The ethnic reference sounded a ghostly alarm from some dark place in the ruins of Marge’s progressive conditioning.
“Sure,” she said. “Chinese are just as horny as anybody else.”
Rowena was thoughtful as she handed Marge the joint.
“I think the Chinese are into a different thing. I think they dig the beauty of the bodies in a kind of aesthetic way.”
<
br /> “I think they’re jerking off.”
“They could do both,” Rowena insisted. “I mean why should beauty be platonic? That’s a western hang-up. They don’t have the Judeo-Christian thing. You know?”
Marge was going through her black plastic carry bag, checking the contents. It had been locked in Holy-o’s office with Rowena.
“Sure,” she said. “The Judeo-Christian thing.”
“Right,” Rowena said. “Where sex is pejorative.”
“I had a pack of cigarettes in here when I put this down,” Marge said. “I’m absolutely sure of it.”
“Oh, shit,” Rowena said and gave Marge back her cigarettes.
“Ask,” Marge said. “Please.”
She took a comb from her bag and combed her hair, looking at herself in the mirror. Although she was only thirty, her dark hair was already streaked with gray. It looked good, she thought.
“It may happen,” she told Rowena, “that you’re short of money and you’re in there with the stand money and you might be tempted. I advise you never, never to take any of it. Because if you do it even once these people will make you sorry you did.”
Rowena regarded Marge with bewilderment.
“Just because I borrowed a cigarette.” She sighed. “People are so uptight. It’s weird.”
“Bear that in mind,” Marge said.
When they came out of the ladies’, they saw Holy-o and Stanley Projectionist going over the vacant rows of seats for lost articles. Stanley took the left side of the auditorium and Holy-o the right. Holy-o had opened his nightly pint of Christian Brothers brandy and was holding it by the neck between his thumb and forefinger as he patrolled the rotten carpet. He moved part of the way on his knees and the heels of his hands. His inspections were always very thorough and he was clever about finding things; in the past week he had found two wallets with some money in them and a strange pair of black gloves. Stanley Projectionist was not nearly as good at finding things and Marge felt that he would really just as soon leave the whole room salvage to Holy-o. But Holy-o insisted. Marge had heard Stanley say that there was nothing on the floor after closing time except burned bottle caps and semen.
“How come he drinks?” Rowena whispered as they watched Holy-o proceed along the carpet. “I thought he was a stuffer.”
