by Robert Stone
“I don’t know much about dilaudid so I don’t know what your tolerance is. Scoff it like coke and see if you get off.”
He moved the bag from the chair; Marge sat down and looked at the postcard.
“It’s scary,” she said.
“Don’t talk about it.”
She crouched over the stuff like a child and drew it into her nostril. Afterward she straightened up so quickly he was afraid she would pass out. She shook her head and sniffed.
He made a second little mound for her.
“Go ahead. Hit the other one.”
She hit the other one, and then sat stock-still; tears ran from her closed eyes. Slowly, she bent forward and rested her forehead against the desk. Hicks moved the phone book out of her way.
In a few minutes, she sat up again and turned to him. She was smiling. She put her arms around his waist; her tears and runny nose wet his shirt. He bent down to her; she rested her head on his shoulder. The tension drained from her in small sobs.
“Better than a week in the country, right?”
Holding to him, she stood up and he helped her to the bed. She lay across it, arching her back, stretching her arms and legs toward its four corners.
“It’s a lot better than a week in the country,” she said. She began to laugh. “It’s better than dilaudid. It’s good.”
She rolled over and hugged herself.
“Right in the head!” She made her hand into a pistol and fired into her temple. “Right in the head.”
He sat down on the bed with her. The glow had come back to her skin, the grace and suppleness of her body flowed again. The light came back, her eyes’ fire. Hicks marveled. It made him happy.
“It does funny little things inside you. It floats inside you. It’s incredible.”
“People use it instead of sex.”
“But it’s just gross how nice it is,” Marge said happily.
Hicks touched her breast.
“Walking with the King. Big H. If God made anything better he never let on. I know all those songs, my sweet.”
Marge sat up in the bed, looking in wonder at the sky outside the window, as blue and regular as the sky over Marine World.
“I see how it works. You have it or you don’t. You have it—everything’s O.K. You don’t, everything’s shit. It’s yes or no. On or off. Stop or go.”
“Write a poem about it,” Hicks said.
She stood up and went back to the desk. She turned to him with a glance of quick mischief. “Please, sir—can I have some more?”
He made a gesture of abundance.
She set about separating another high from the dope on the sheet of paper.
“This one is for jollity,” she said. “Purely recreational.”
He checked the size of the dose and let her wail.
“It’s its own poem.” she said, when the lift came. “Very serious elegant poem.”
“It’s just like everything else,” Hicks said.
She found one of his cigarettes by the backpack and lit it. He had never seen her smoke before. For a long time she stood looking out at the beach. Hicks watched her, wishing that she would speak to him again—but she was silent now, smiling, blowing smoke at the picture window.
“Remember the night we ran the freaks out?” Hicks asked her. “We made it after. You remember?”
She turned her lofty empty smile on him and he felt, again, a dart of loneliness.
“I remember everything. With absolute clarity. Since you walked in on me.” Her elbow slid from the windowsill where she had been resting it and she almost lost her balance. “Every twitch. Every bead of sweat. Every shiver. Believe me.”
“What can I do,” Hicks said. “I gotta believe you.”
“I’m just a little slip of a thing,” Marge said, “but I’m all primary process. I live the examined life. Not one funny little thing gets by me.”
He got up and went to the desk where the leavings of Marge’s measure lay across the Los Angeles telephone book.
“You would have come in handy. Where you been?”
“I’ve been maintaining an establishment. That’s where I’ve been.”
The matchbook cover Marge had used was wet. He ripped off another one.
“You talking about your old man? That’s an establishment?”
Marge let herself slide down to the floor beneath the window.
“Don’t you put my old man down,” she said. “My old man is a subtle fella. He’s a can of worms.”
Hicks sniffed his dope and shook his head violently.
“The next fucking time he calls me a psychopath—I’m gonna tell him you said that.”
He sat waiting to go off; in a moment he was in the bathroom vomiting bourbon residue from the bottom of his guts. When the vomiting stopped, he brushed his teeth.
Back in the bedroom, he surmised that he was high. The room was all easy lines and soft light, his steps were cushioned. He turned on the television set but he could not get it to work. There were some nice color bands, so he watched those for a while and then turned it off.
“Did you think I left you?” Marge asked him. “Is that why you did up?”
Hicks shrugged.
“Just for old times’ sake.”
He lay down on the bed beside her and watched dust columns spin before the window.
“Yes, it’s easy,” he said, laughing foolishly. “Yes, it’s good.”
“It is good, isn’t it?” Marge said. “I mean high quality.”
“So they tell me.” He leaned into the pillows and breathed deeply.
“This is a different ball game,” he said.
Marge was staring at the ceiling with an expression like reverence.
“It really had me there,” she said. “I had cramps. My nose wouldn’t stop running. I was genuinely sick.”
“Maybe it was all in your head.”
“Not all of it.”
He moved closer to her and put his hand under the back of her neck.
“What a goof you are! Don’t brag about it. It’s not such a tough condition. It’s not what you want.”
“Maybe it is,” she said. “It’s simpler than life.”
“Come on.” He closed his eyes and laughed. “It’s just like everything else. This is life.”
“Where springs fail not,” Marge said.
“Springs?”
She arched her back, letting her weight fall on the bed. making the frame creak.
“Springs fail not,” she said. “It’s a Polish toast. It means ‘to life.’”
Hicks laughed weakly. “Jesus.” He turned over on his stomach and folded his hands between her breasts. “It’s a poem, you cooze. I read it. It’s a poem.”
She put her face close to his and laughed with her mouth open as if in surprise.
“Yes,” she said, “its a smack poem.”
Looking into her eyes, he suddenly felt a perfect confidence. The payoff, whatever it was, would take care of itself. There was no stopping him.
He got up quickly and went to the telephone table. It was littered with dope and debris, the smack in its plastic bag lying beside the phone.
“This is ignorance,” he said, and set about packing it away. “This is what they call in the trade ‘plain view.’”
When the table was clear and the dope secured, he sat down by the phone with his forehead resting on his palm.
“I don’t know what our chances are. I don’t think they’re too great. But I’m gonna call Eddie Peace.”
“Whatever’s right,” Marge said.
CONVERSE HAD LITTLE SATISFACTION FROM THE LAWYER.
A plantation of fine gray hair hung to shoulder length from the lawyer’s bald crown, giving him the look of a mad pinko professor in a vintage Hearst cartoon. When Converse described his adventures in the motel kitchenette, the lawyer shrugged and smiled in an irritating manner. Converse had the impression that the lawyer did not like him and did not sympathize with his distress
.
“This is common,” the lawyer said. “This is the way they operate.”
The lawyer said that if Converse wanted to approach the authorities with a statement he might indeed do so but that an attorney with better contracts in the district attorney’s office might render more valuable assistance. He said that, obviously, Converse should be extremely careful—should not agree to private meetings with anyone unknown to him and should take whatever steps he was capable of to safeguard his residence and person. If arrested, the lawyer reminded him, he was entitled to a phone call.
Apparently, the lawyer remarked. Converse believed in rugged individualism, and this was just as well because it would require some very rugged individualism indeed to keep him afloat.
The lawyer used the term “afloat.”
Converse had salved his ear in vaseline and bandaged it with cotton and gauze. He walked along Van Ness Street, avoiding eye contact. He had spent part of the night on the floor of the motel and the rest in Berkeley, asleep under the devil drawing in Janey’s room. In the morning he had gone to the Pacific office and borrowed some of the Thorazine that Douglas Dalton kept handy for delirium tremens. He assumed it helped some.
Thus tranquil, Converse followed the street like a sleepwalker to Aquatic Park and sat on a bench among exercising bouncers and topless dancers with sun reflectors at their chins. Some of the girls aroused him and arousal made him think first of Charmian, then of Marge. The urgency of desire surprised him. After a while, he began to feel a peculiar kind of contempt for his own lust and for the women who inspired it—but anger eluded him. He had no anger to bring to bear. In time, he supposed he would lose even fear. He found fearlessness an extremely difficult state to conceive, like the hereafter.
When he had rested for an hour or so, he decided to go and have a talk with June.
The San Frenciscan was a structure of pastel metal blocks built in the form of a wedge so that both grids of its minimal windows faced the harbor. The view from one angle was of Alcatraz, from the other of Coit Tower and the Bay Bridge. The attendants in the lobby were costumed as Santa Ana’s hussars and many were actually Mexican.
June’s room was at the end of an airless immaculate corridor; a closed circuit television camera surveyed the hall from a point just above her door.
For quite a while, she declined to open but after he had slid his red and yellow Vietnamese press card under the door she let him in.
“Why didn’t you call up?” she asked him. She was fair-haired and freckled with a hardening baby face, wearing tight faded Levi’s and a halter with anchors on it. Her voice reminded him of the voices of telephone operators who answered from Bismarck or Edmonton when he misdialed an area code.
“What else you got with your name on it?”
He showed her his passport. There was a color television set in the room tuned to the day’s Giant game; the sound was off.
“How’d I ever get mixed up in this happy horseshit?” She took a cigarette from a pack on the television set and lit it. She seemed slightly drunk or fatigued.
“I understand you had my daughter for a while.”
“Isn’t she all right?”
“I hope so,” Converse said. “I haven’t seen her.”
“Well, we took good care of her. You ask Bender.”
Converse went to the blue tinted window and looked out at Treasure Island and the bridge.
“Do you know where Marge is?”
She widened her Scandian cornflower eyes in annoyance.
“Don’t give me a hard time.”
“Understand my position,” Converse said.
June shook her head, and turned her back on him. He saw that there was another room with a second television set in it. A pale blue uniform suit with a flight pin at the breast pocket was spread on its hanger across a bed.
“What were you doing over there?” she asked him.
“Writing.”
“So you’re back and your old lady is doing something else. It’s not unknown.”
“It’s awkward for me.”
She gave him a brief, shrill laugh.
“Well don’t be peasant about it, man. Learn to live with it because some things are more important than boy-girl.”
“Boy-girl,” Converse said, “isn’t the trouble.”
She looked at the bandage over his ear.
“No?”
“First there was the disappointment. Then yesterday somebody burned me over a stove.”
She put her cigarette out and shook her head quickly with her eyes closed.
“It’s not my problem, John. Don’t give me a hard time.”
“If this is your idea of a hard time, you haven’t met the people I have.”
“That’s a threat,” she said.
“No, it’s not.”
The walls were beige with silver bamboo leaves painted on them.
“Is this where you had Janey?” he asked her.
“I don’t live here. Who burned you?”
“Two guys.”
“Freaks?”
“More or less.”
“I get it,” she said. “I see.”
He sat down carefully on the edge of a sofa that matched the walls. “If you get it—where’s Marge?”
Her eyelids fluttered. Her eyes looked slightly out of focus as though the effort of being casual was putting her to sleep.
“Marge is away, man. On vacation. Pee Vee. Guaymas. Rosarita, cha cha cha.” She snapped her fingers twice. “They’re hiding for Christ’s sake. I don’t know where they are.”
“All right,” Converse said.
She settled onto the far end of the sofa and looked at her watch.
“How did Janey end up with you?”
“I was doing a favor for a buddy.”
“For Ray Hicks?”
“Yeah for Ray.” She watched him drowsily and lit another cigarette. “They didn’t screw you. I mean as far as I know they didn’t. They got taken off.”
Converse could not restrain a sigh.
“They still got the dope though. It’s your dope, right?”
He shrugged without answering.
“Well, they still got it. Or as far as I know they still got it.”
He was nodding thoughtfully as though the intelligence were of some value to him.
“Scared?”
“Yes, indeed,” he said.
“You seem just like an ordinary guy. Why’d you try it?”
“We’re all just ordinary guys.”
June laughed.
“That’s what you think. Do you know Those Who Are?”
“Those Who Are? Those who are what?”
“Forget it,” June said. “It’s a gag.”
“It sounds really funny.” he said. She looked at him with sympathy.
“Me, I’m getting loose of these people. I’m straight, I got a chance of my old job back. They won’t see me around this town again.”
“What’s your old job? Are you a stew?”
“Used to be,” June said. “Will be again for a while. See, when I knew Ray I was into running shit from Bangkok. No scag—just Laotian Red and such. Then I started dealing myself and I met this guy Owen and then we were both dealing.”
“I guess I ought to thank you,” Converse said. “For having Janey.”
“Sure,” June said and looked at her watch.
“How was Marge?”
“Well, she wasn’t hurt. She was pretty fucked up. You want to get back with her?”
“I don’t know.”
“I really hope everybody makes out.” June said. “I been up against so many people’s paranoia that I’m really turned around. When I get east, man, I’m gonna get some protection and nothing and nobody’s gonna get to me.” She watched the television set for a while; the camera was panning over the stands as the fans in Candlestick Park took their seventh-inning stretch. “That’s what this country needs is protection.”
“Tell me,” Conv
erse said, “who do you think it was that burned me?”
“Who do I think it was? Well, I guess it was the people who took off your wife. They were right there when Ray got in so they must have been expecting everybody. You can figure your troubles started over in Nam.”
“Yes,” Converse said. They sat watching the Atlanta pitcher warm up. “Do you know a cop named Antheil?”
“He’s not a cop,” June said. “He’s a regulatory agent. I know him.”
“He’s been harassing my father-in-law. He seems to think Marge is mixed up in a dope ring.”
“Well, you’ve all got my sympathy.” She smiled and shuddered. “Is that what he said? A dope ring?”
“So I understand.”
“That sounds like him.”
“If you were dealing dope,” Converse said, “How come you know what he sounds like?”
“Oh man,” June said sadly, “I don’t want your paranoia. I know the dude, that’s all. The guy I was with,” she said, “he had dealings with Antheil. Antheil has lots of dealings.”
“Why is he a regulatory agent instead of a cop?”
“Because he works for a regulatory agency. And that’s what he calls himself.”
“I see,” Converse said.
“He knows everybody, right? He’s got a lot of sources. He pays them. I don’t know if he stands still for their dealing but I guess he’d have to.
“I made it with Ray, O.K.? Owen was very possessive, he found out about it. After they split Owen got loaded and called Antheil. He had a theory about where they were going.” She watched a throw to first, an easy out. “I think he’s wrong. I hope he’s wrong.”
“Where did he think they were going?”
June shook her head.
“You wouldn’t find it by yourself. It’s way out in the toolies. Anyway, it’s not where they went.”
“All right,” Converse said.
They watched the game.
“Sorry to hear you got Antheil after you. He’s very weird. He’s not your ordinary nark.”
“Why not.”
“He’s a lawyer. He used to work for the civil service commission and for the internal revenue. Then some shit went down and he transferred. He knows a lot of heavy political people, Owen says.”
A lock of Converse’s hair had stuck to his bandage. He tried cautiously to disengage it.
