by Robert Stone
“He’s a snitch, I know he is. He’ll burn me or turn me for sure. It’s a circus.”
“Actually,” Marge said, “I think it’s very clever of you to have come up with him.”
“If I were really clever,” Hicks said, as they pulled out, “I wouldn’t even know Eddie Peace.”
They rolled uphill to the Strip, past the Whiskey a Go-Go, the Chateau Marmont, the revolving moose. At a stop light, Marge found herself exchanging stares with a man in a Luftwaffe officer’s hat.
“Why do you think he made me for a schoolteacher?” Marge asked when the light had changed.
“Because that’s what you look like,” Hicks said.
CONVERSE WOKE IN THE MORNING ABOUT SEVEN. SUNLIGHT lit the Venetian blinds and glittered on plastic desk tops; for a moment, he thought that he had awakened in the offices of MACV.
He took off his shirt and soaped himself in Elmer’s washroom. He needed a shave. His Saigon khaki pants were clean. He had a long-sleeved blue shirt into which he had changed when arriving from the airport—and in which he had just slept—and a gray windbreaker. Relative invisibility, should it be required.
The machines in the factory floors were already turned on as he went downstairs and he passed hard-eyed black girls on their way to the stitching tables. Outside, the Bay wind, the California taste of the air, startled him again. Although the day was clear, it seemed very cold to him. He stopped when he reached the first corner and looked over his shoulder but he saw no tan car and no one on Mission Street seemed at all concerned with him. He walked in the direction of the Civic Center and stopped at the Foster’s on the corner of Geary and Van Ness for Danish and coffee. The food, the briskness of the day, the availability of a lawyer led him toward optimism. It was possible that they had not connected him with anything directly. It was possible that all might yet be well. He strolled the Tenderloin streets for a while, almost enjoying the city and his return. When he was tired of walking, he went into a Catholic church on Taylor street and sat before the plaster image of St. Anthony of Padua. He even considered lighting a candle.
It was the church and the proximity of St. Anthony that put Converse in mind of his mother. One of St. Anthony’s spiritual attributes was his willingness to assist in the recovery of lost articles, and in the declining years of her life, Mrs. Converse had conceived a particular devotion to him. More and more things were missing.
She had lived for seven years in a deteriorating hotel on Turk Street and Converse visited her about twice a year. At least once—usually around the time of her birthday—they dined out together. Converse had always taken particular pleasure in announcing that he was having dinner with her. It seemed to him to conjure up an image of deliciously respectable sophistication which, as Converse well knew, was quite different from the actuality of the event.
Sitting before St. Anthony, waiting to see his lawyer, Converse thought of her and it occurred to him that other young men on the wrong side of the law—perhaps other importers of heroin waiting to see their lawyers—might at the same moment be sitting at the feet of St. Anthony and thinking of their mothers. Since there was so much time to lose and he was in the neighborhood, Converse decided to take her to lunch. It would be kind and it would keep him busy until three o’clock.
His mother’s hotel was called the Montalvo. The desk clerk was a black man with a Masonic tie clasp; when Converse asked for his mother the clerk pointed to a corner of the lobby where the television set was.
“That lady,” the man said in stiff British colonial tones, “will be a problem to us all shortly.”
The lobby smelled, very faintly, of garbage. They had taken most of the furniture out. Such of it as remained was arranged before a television set in a corner alcove where it decayed, splinter by thread, under the old parties who infested it.
Halfway across the stained floor, Converse caught sight of his mother, and stopped for a moment to watch her. She was absorbed in the entertainment on the box—something that sounded like a celebrity game show. Her false teeth were encompassed in a loose smile and her glasses were low on the bridge of her nose. There in the Montalvo lobby, Converse felt himself slide into some moment nearly thirty years vanished—he was beside her in a darkened movie theater, turning to look up at her as she watched the film on the screen. She was smiling over her glasses at the bitter wit of Dan Duryea or the suavity of Zachary Scott, unaware of the child beside her who was looking up at her in—in love, as Converse recalled. It seemed very strange to him as he watched her before the Montalvo’s television set.
Suddenly her contented expression vanished. An old man had occupied the lipstick-red lounge chair beside her. He was quite well turned out, the sort of old boy, who, like Douglas Dalton, owned a couple of suits and a whisk broom. Converse’s mother stared at him in hatred and terror. She began mouthing words in venomous silence; she clenched her fists in rage. The old man paid absolutely no attention to her.
Converse came around the set and stood above her trying to smile. It was several moments before she looked up at him and the smile she gave him was as joyless as his own.
“Is it you?” she asked. It was not a rhetorical question.
“Sure,” Converse said. “Of course it’s me.”
He bent to kiss her on the cheek. The flesh his lips touched was swollen and bruised nearly black from her constant picking at it. She smelled of death.
“It isn’t you,” she told him with curious conviction. For a moment, he thought she was being coy in some infantile fashion but he shortly realized that she was probably hallucinating.
“Yes, it is,” he said. “It’s me. John.”
She stared at him. The reptile faces of the other viewers turned toward them.
“Come on,” Converse said. He managed to keep smiling. “We’re going to lunch.”
“Oh,” his mother said. “Lunch?”
He helped her up, and they walked slowly out of the lobby, past the stare of the clerk.
“You’re in Vietnam,” his mother said when they were out on the street.
“Not any more. I’m back now.”
After a few uncertain steps, he got her to take his arm and he led her across Turk Street. He had thought that he would take her to Joe’s Place where they had large martinis and good beef but it no longer seemed a very agreeable idea.
“How’s everything?”
She answered him with a snarl of disgust. She had always been good at dramatizing herself; the sound conveyed genuine and profound bitterness.
“. . . everything!” She shook her fist as she had at the old man in the lobby.
Joe’s Place had a maître d’hôtel who seemed quite pleased to see them until he had a closer look at Converse’s mother. He seated them at a small table in the rear room, in close proximity to two sunburned couples with Texas accents.
Converse drank his first martini quickly and hastened to order a second. It was, he reasoned, the only way through it. His mother drank her own drink greedily and although it did not make her a bit more presentable, it seemed to improve her mood.
“What do you think of my face?” she asked when she was three-quarters through the martini.
While trying to appear attentive, Converse had avoided looking at her face for very long.
“You look very well.”
“I’ve got it back in place,” she whispered happily. “I’ve been doing special exercises.” She jerked at the folds of ruined tissue. In a moment, her expression darkened.
“They had it wrong. They had it all haywire.” Suddenly she clenched her teeth and stared at him in a frenzy. “They were making me black!”
Converse glanced nervously about the restaurant.
“They talked to me through a tube. They said I had to marry Hodges!”
“Hodges?”
“Oh,” she cried impatiently, “the clerk!”
She commenced an impersonation of Hodges, piping inaudible words in effete falsetto, rolling her eyes like a s
tage Othello.
Converse drank deeply ol his martini. A freckled blonde among the party of Texans tapped her escort on his beefy forearm and nodded in their direction.
“Johnny,” Converse’s mother was saying, “they’re after all your money! You mustn’t give it to them!”
Converse watched her uncertainly.
“Who is?”
His mother flung her head in exasperation.
“The people in the hotel!” She lowered her voice and gripped his arm. “They’re black but they pose as white! Except Hodges because he can’t. That’s why they want him to marry me. So they can have your money.”
The money with which she was so obsessed was the money he had made from his play ten years before. Money had always been the overriding interest of her life and since the play she had come to see him as a guileless wastrel of limitless wealth.
“You mustn’t let them have it!”
“Of course not,” Converse said.
“Last night they came in and stretched my tights!”
Converse’s eyes met those of the Texas blonde. She was eating chocolate and vanilla ice cream mixed together on her spoon; at the moment of eye contact she had removed the spoon from her mouth with some melting ice cream still on it and was dipping it into the dish for more.
“They came in and stole them and wore them all up and down the hall. Now they’re all stretched and out of shape because it was some fat person. Fat!” She wrinkled her nose in disgust. “A big fat woman!” She gulped down the rest of her martini and clenched her fist.
The Texans were awaiting their check in silence. At Converse’s signal, a waiter rolled up a serving table and began to carve slices of roast beef. Converse’s mother watched him divide portions with the closest attention. When the beef was served she called for horseradish and spooned an enormous amount of it out on her plate.
“Did you make a lot of money in Vietnam?” she asked, after a few mouthfuls.
Converse blinked.
“No,” he said.
His mother looked alarmed.
“Why not?”
“It isn’t a place where you make a lot of money.”
“Yes,” she insisted. “Yes it is!”
Converse addressed himself to the roast beef.
“Did the girl get it?”
She meant Marge.
“Did she? Oh,” she wailed disconsolately, “the girl got it.”
“Nonsense,” Converse said quickly and looked at his watch.
“There is money in Vietnam,” his mother said. “Did you know that Ho Chi Minh used to cook in the big hotels? Smart men very often like to cook.”
The Texas tourists paid their bill and filed out, glancing sideways at Converse and his mother. The last out was a small pinch-faced man who had been sitting through lunch with his back to them. He had had a great deal to drink during lunch and he paused on his way to stare down at them with a mixture of bonhomie, curiosity, and suspicion. Converse’s mother looked up at him in dread.
“Y’all havin’ a nice time?” he asked.
“You!” Converse’s mother cried. “Are you a friend of Johnny’s?”
“No, ma’am. I just ast ye if y’ore havin’ a nice time.”
“Do you know a place I could stay? Somewhere they won’t stretch my tights?”
“Thanks a lot,” Converse said. “We’re fine. You enjoy yourselves.”
“Stretch your tights?” the Texan asked. His friends called for him and he went out with a puzzled expression.
The waiter brought coffee while their luncheon plates were still on the table. Converse hastened to call for the check but his mother lingered over her horseradish.
“They followed me to the Turkish bath,” his mother told him. “They said I put dirt on the towels.”
As Converse was shaking his head in sympathy, two longhaired youngish men came in and sat down where the tourists had been. One of them had a beard. He looked very much—very much—like the bearded man whose eyes Converse had fled in Macy’s. He insisted to himself that it was not possible but the food went cold in his guts.
“As if I’d put dirt on the towels. They’re devils, Johnny! They’re devils!”
Converse glanced at the bearded man and the thrill of recognition rang loud and clear. The man was watching his mother eat in a way he found particularly unpleasant.
The second man was younger and fair-haired. When Converse essayed a look at him he raised the point of his chin and bared his teeth in a kind of smile. It seemed to Converse that he heard someone speak the words “too old to fuck.”
“The girl does bad things with Hodges,” Converse’s mother said. “I hear them through the tube.”
The maître d’hôtel had come to the table where the two men sat. He was telling them that they could not sit there if they did not care to order lunch. They paid absolutely no attention to him.
Finally, Converse turned to face them. He tried at first to register indifference shading into disapproval. He and the two men looked at each other for a considerable time; when the exchange was over they rose and left as though they had come for no other purpose than to stare at him.
As he watched them leave Converse felt that he had failed to communicate indifference. It seemed to him that a surprising degree of intimacy had been established during the short time in which they had faced each other, that there would be things to talk about and that he would not enjoy it.
ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS WAS ON THE TELEVISION set. Black and white. Converse had just had an injection; there were spots of blood on his forearm which were running into streaks. The blood tracks were familiar in some way. They had made him take his clothes off like doctors. The set was turned up to high volume.
“So nu,” the bearded man named Danskin was saying, “where is it?”
“Where is what?”
“Where is what,” the bearded man said mockingly. He pinched Converse on the cheek.
Smitty came in from the bathroom. The shower was on.
“What did he say?”
“He said ‘where is what’.”
“Ooh,” Smitty said in an affected effeminate manner. He punched Converse across the face with a stiff girlish forearm. It was a joke but each of the punches hurt.
Converse was kneeling on the floor. He was extremely confused. His breath was labored and he felt very hot.
“I can’t get no hot water out of that shower,” Smitty said. Danskin shook his head.
“What kind of a place is this?”
Converse went into some kind of glide. It was the injection. When he came out he was looking at the television set. He knew what was happening there—he had seen the film. A mustachioed coward was attempting to bail out of his stricken aircraft with the only available parachute.
Danskin was watching television too.
“When in doubt,” he told Converse, “bail out.”
When Converse tried to stand up Danskin struck him on the side of the head and closed his right ear.
“Where is it, fucker?”
Converse shook his head. He was hot; he felt as though enormous quantities of sweat were straining against his pores unable to get through his skin. They had spread towels everywhere.
“What was in the needle?” he asked them. They watched him stand up. When he was upright, he tried to charge Smitty but his legs failed him. He was trying to bail out.
On the floor he looked up into Smitty’s face. It was an undersea face; the eyes were only part of an inflated bag of venom behind it. If the bag were removed from the head, there would be eyes all over its surface. Protective coloration.
Smitty kicked him and he rolled over and retched into the towels. He had lost lunch some time before.
The television set was playing Rachmaninoff. “The world’s finest melodies can be yours,” it said.
“The world’s finest melodies?” Converse asked. Danskin and Smitty laughed at him.
They had picked him up two blocks from the
Montalvo in front of twenty citizens. He had ridden to the motel with a pistol pressed against his scrotum.
“Nobody out there but bloods, bubi,” Danskin had told him. “They don’t care.”
“Where is it, fucker?”
“I don’t know,” Converse said. “What was in the needle?”
Danskin did accents. “Ve ask ze questions,” he said.
They pulled him upright and walked him into a small kitchenette next to the Murphy bed. Smitty turned on one of the ring burners and they watched it until it glowed bright orange. They were both holding him from behind.
“Please,” Converse said.
Smitty shoved the end of a towel in his mouth; Danskin was caressing the back of his neck.
They’re going to do it, Converse thought. He strained backward and he was so frightened that they had a difficult time holding him. Somehow he burned his hand. And burned it. And burned it.
He screamed and they let him fall to the kitchenette floor. He rolled on the linoleum in the fetal position with the fried hand thrust between his thighs.
“I go nuts,” someone on the television said.
Then they had him upright. The towel again. They were shoving his head forward and downward toward the burner. He was trying to jump up and down and the sweat broke through at last.
“When I say where is it,” Jules asked, “what am I talking about?”
“The dope,” Converse said, when Smitty took the towel from his mouth. Even fear could not keep him from another glide and he came out looking into Danskin’s eyes. The phrase “fine eyes” crossed his mind.
Danskin embraced him.
“Hooray,” Danskin cried. “Way to go.”
Converse accepted Danskin’s embrace. He was grateful. His hand hurt.
In a moment they had his face over the burner again. When he tried to turn away from it, they seized him by the hair.
“Here’s the way it is,” Danskin said. “I’m walking down the street. I come to a ladder up against a store window. I walk around it.”
The skin on Converse’s face began to hurt terribly. He struggled again and they pulled him back. Jules took his face between his two hands.
