Lucille, wet once again, had balled herself up in a chair by the hearth. Poor girl. The world wouldn’t reckon like she’d been told.
“You blockheads,” she said with tears in her eyes. “You’re all a pack of blockheads.” Dinky’s nose was crusty with blood and snot. Anyone else would’ve been horrified just to see him. But these people, they didn’t say a word. “All I wanted,” Lucille said, “was a bag of ice.”
Part of me had a craving to smack Lucille. Instead I knelt down before her. “Pretty often,” I said, “it’s hard to tell the difference between what hurts and what doesn’t.”
“I’m a sellout,” she said. “A crappy, lousy sellout.”
“I don’t know about all that,” Basil said. “I mean, you’re just doing what you got to do.”
“What would you know about it?”
“I work.”
“At staying drunk you do. At schmoozing you do.”
“Lucy,” I said.
“You’re wasting your time, AJ,” Basil said. “Nothing you can do when she gets like this.”
Lucille took up the National Enquirer at her feet and began to shred it. “How would you like to go around calling yourself, AJH vanden Heuvel, failed painter? AJH vanden Heuvel, CreditCom’s newest Junior Project Analyst?”
“No one said you can’t still do your thing,” I said.
“Oh, joy. Yes, I’ll give china-painting lessons Sunday afternoons. That’ll do it.”
I put a hand on her leg. “Have a beer,” I said.
“I know what I am,” she said. “It’s just that I can’t seem to help myself.”
“People only think they know what they are.”
“Yeah, well, I may not know all that, but what I think I know is that I’m a bitch.”
“You hear that?” Basil said. “Mark that shit down.”
“What I want to know,” Lucille said, “is how life ever got to be so lovely and sweet.”
The dead bird, its horrible stink, I couldn’t get away…
I looked over my shoulder, and what should I see but two eyes staring from this poster, a cowgirl circa ’75, with her fringed suede vest and denim blouse round the tits of the poster girl she was. She’d perked herself up against a pair of skis to smile toward the bedroom her smile let you know you’d soon be in… And now a shade’s old song gamboled through my head, a poem I’d written way, way back, the worst… a thousand wintry heaves ache beneath the sky… stop the whisper, recall the spring… when your shadow nears my blood, i sleep…
“He needs a doctor,” I said.
“Is he sick?” Lucille said.
“Is he sick.”
“Are you sick, Dinky?” said Hickory. She’d got down beside him now and was stroking his arm.
“Look at him,” I said. “I mean, Christ, you know?”
Basil drained a beer and flung the can. “Let’s everybody look at poor Dinky.” He wrinkled up his face and extended his hands like an impresario weary of his freak. “You’d think he’s miserable. But the thing is, he likes it when crap goes sour.”
“Are you actually putting effort into being such a dick?” Hickory said.
“All this attention he gets?” Basil said. “He’s as happy as white on rice.”
The tube meantime had been feeding us steady ruin—houses mired in water and mud; trees on roads; children clutching elders; stern-faced men, spent-faced men, some with slickers, others dusters, hauling sandbags and chattel; stranded vehicles and collapsing bridges; creatures mad with terror…
“AJ, baby,” Basil said. “Bosom buddy. Please. Where the hell’s my truck?”
“There was this rabbit,” I said. “A guy gave us a ride.”
“And who, pray tell, might that be?” Hickory said.
I told them about Super and his monkey. I told them about Fortinbras, and the little red Christ, and the truck of mangled dolls. Dinky stood up and shouted. He said how nervous we’d got when Super claimed to read our thoughts, how the geeze had ranted on about eagles and atomizers, the reversal of poles and the rest. Hickory asked if he was a shrink.
“He gave us drugs,” Dinky said.
That got them frisky, all right.
“I’ll tell you guys what,” Basil said. “Maybe—and I mean just maybe—if you two morons get me really fucking baked, I’ll forget you wrecked my truck.”
I hadn’t thought to query the old man whether he kept a stash for times he ran across dorks in the rain at night. That’s what I said.
“So what was his name, then?” said Lucille.
“This you’re not going to believe.”
“Like I didn’t already stop believing anything you say ten years back.”
“He said it was Stuyvesant Something Something. Yeah. But he told us to call him Super.”
Lucille said, “Next you’ll be telling us he put a gun to your head and banged you in the heiny.”
“Banged them in the ear, more like it,” Basil said. “Knocked what was left of their rocks clean out.”
Hickory said, “But wouldn’t it be a marvel if he and Dinky were blood?”
Basil was pacing. “What are we going to do about my truck?” He poked Dinky’s arm. “Cause in case you guys didn’t know, good old shit for brains here was right for once in his life. The weatherman says it’s going to flood like hell.”
“Limo Wreck” became “The Day I Tried to Live.” We gaped speechless at the phone till Hickory’s sigh confirmed the real.
“We’re stuck,” she said.
Basil took up his knife. For a long time he gave us his back, running a thumb down the blade, but then he spun round and flung the thing at a pile of wood.
“You two morons are so lucky,” he said after his knife had clattered to the floor. “I should skin you both, right here and now.”
“You’re lucky Granddad isn’t here to skin you,” Dinky said. “Granddad wouldn’t like the way you’re treating his place.”
Lucille’s face looked suddenly very stupid, like some girl about to get killed in a flick. “Did you hear that?” she said. No one said a word. “It was a voice,” she said. “Like some horrible singing.”
“You might remember, kids,” Basil said, “there’s something out there called a storm?”
“Sometimes, squeeze,” Lucille said, “I think about what a bummer it is I’m not a man. I’d fuck you so hard you’d never—”
Subtle though it was, the sound repeated, just as Lucille had said, like some horrible singing. She went to the window—followed by me and Hickory and Basil with his hatchet—and moved from it to the next.
“Maybe it was a bear,” she said after we’d covered the place for nothing.
Again Basil turned on her. “That’s about as retarded as when you didn’t know what a belly button is.” This was true. At a lobster joint north of Ensenada, Lucille had downed a pitcher of booze and claimed belly buttons the stuff of shots at birth.
“Bears hibernate, Lucille,” Dinky said.