“The army say anything to you about that bark of yours?” I said.
“The army doesn’t say anything unless you get your arm blown off.”
“You could pay down the debt yourself, you know. If you’d just get serious.”
“How much more serious can we get than clearing mines from a war zone in the middle of hellish winter?”
“Pass the bar, Dinky. Do the law.”
“There’s no need to torture us, you know.”
“I’m all gold,” I said, and took another slug. “If nothing else you got the name for it.”
“Now, class,” Dinky said with the nasally voice he assumed to mock himself. “Why is it we think Stuyvesant Wainwright the Fourth has failed the bar six times?” He raised his eyebrows and spoke in singsong cadence. “Because he didn’t learn anything in school but how to do lots and lots of drugs and drink lots and lots of booze. Let that,” he said, “be a lesson in how to fail.”
“And get sick,” I said.
For an instant through the trees the casinos glimmered down the strip. The dealers hung tight in those mad shops, I knew how, working the gamblers to their rings. Where was Hickory—her eyes, her mouth, the voice that purred from it?
“The army,” said Dinky, raising his arm strongman-like. “That takes youth.”
He turned at me to grin. Which is why I thought he might not’ve seen the mudslide on the road, though in truth he had, because all at once his eyes popped out, and we went lurching this way and that until we broke into a spin that closed on a bank of stones.
I woke up to a land of dark. Neither Dinky nor I said a word. We just sat there in the cold, and all that giant black seemed to’ve swallowed up the world. Where were all the lovely people? Where were all the vermin, and where were all the stars?
When finally I got the nerve to look at my friend, he was pinned in his seat by the wheel. It wasn’t until I’d begun to think maybe he was knocked out, maybe even dead, that he wriggled free. Out in the night, he looked like one of those freaks you see on Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, the one abducted by Martians. He stood there for a minute, then staggered off and fell in the mud.
“It used to be when I coughed I heard bees in my head. Now all I hear is fire.”
“Write a poem about it sometime,” I said, and scanned the road.
“AJ… AJ…” And then, “Please.”
“We’re buddies,” I told him. “Remember?”
Mud rushed down the mountain. The rain was an opaque sheet. I held Dinky’s head and waited.
“Get me that bourbon, would you?”
And then we heard an engine, a song for all we cared, followed by lights through the dark and, again, after something like an epoch, a truck round the bend.
“You see that, buddy?” I said, waving my arms. “That’s your guardian angel. We’ll be home in a minute.”
BASIL HAD NO BALLS TO JUMP LUCILLE TILL THE stretch last summer at San Quintín. Dinky had passed out that night, though it wouldn’t have mattered. Sooner or later she’d have left him as she did. Nearly five whole years they’d stuck it out—a goodish while in the buddy world, an eon or two for her. It was midnight on the beach, the moon was making hay. I’d stuffed my pockets with silver dollars and fireworks, and packets of musty Chiclets. The fine grey sand was dancing everywhere, across the dunes and slick opalescence where the water meets the shore. When at last I spied them in a hollow of grass, Lucille was bouncing like the bluest blue-movie girl the boys have ever seen. Doubtless neither had meant to hurt our friend. What were they, anyhow, but two sad dolts caught up in the malice of affairs? Lucille wasn’t as mean back then, either, not like she’d come to be. She was free from the fear of her corporate future, if in fact that’s what it had been. Nor did Basil ever hold ills, nothing genuine at least. He was a single child. He only knew to take what he saw. I never expected more. Still, they should’ve known better than to play with the clan. We’d pledged allegiance to it like a flag: Buddies forever, we’d promised, and we were solemn. But today things were different. I knew it. Dinky knew it, too. We all did. And now to prove it he was sprawled in a storm with his bottle, waiting for the guy that had just rolled up to save us.
First thing I noticed was the monkey—dead—dangling from the mirror on a string of beads. It could’ve been a fetus of hair, this thing, with pebbles for eyes and corn for teeth. The man that had hung it sat motionless behind the wheel, clad in weathered denim. He had sunken cheeks and hollow eyes and a silver beard to boot. I scratched my ear—his eyes traced my hand. I drummed my fingers—his eyes traced my hand. Klaus Kinski came to mind, as Herzog’s Nosferatu, and grunions filled my head, beneath a heavy moon. We were alone.
“That little flake,” said the man as he nodded to the monkey, “is called José.” He sucked a tooth and gestured to a crucifix he himself must have painted red. “Ronald, though, he’s not so bad as Fortinbras or him.” Tattooed across the fingers of one hand was the word BEND, across the other, GIVE. A cigarette twitched in the webbing there. Empties fouled the dash.
“We hit a bear,” I said.
Why I did I couldn’t say. We’d had an accident. What difference how? Maybe I feared any less a case for invading the old man’s turf—and sure as shit I had such a feeling, like I’d missed some glaring portent of doom, I didn’t know—would send him on a rampage. Or maybe it was just his creepy gaze.
“Who’s that?” he said. Dinky was still in the mud.
“He’s sick.”
“I see, I see, so that’s who he is.”
“Listen, mister, we need a ride bad.”
“You need something bad,” said the man. In slow order he tapped the Christ, the monkey, and the yellow dog beside him. “What do you fellows think R-E this crisis?” I stood waiting while he sucked his teeth some more and spit. “Throw him in,” he said with a jerk of his thumb to the rear.
“He’s sick,” I said.
“You hear that, Fortinbras?” he said to the dog.
I found no change in the geeze’s tone, but Fortinbras dropped from the window and appeared in the bed behind him. A spate of dolls in varied dismemberment lay about the beast, some missing heads, others arms or legs. The man shot me a look part fishy, part fatherly, his eyes running off two ways at once.
“You going to lay one, boy, or get off the pot?”
I wanted to be naked, to lie naked beneath a tender sun. I wanted the smell of a clean bright day, and heat, tart and dry. I wanted a heat that lasted, endless sand, visions of dazzle and grain. Why wouldn’t his eyes release me?… Lanterns, vultures, many things in hell… I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever… Madmen know nothing…
I got Dinky in the cab. The man took my hand. It was smooth and hard and cold as outer space.
“The