Five Great Novels Part 9

"I'll walk, then," Arctor said, which was what he had wanted to do anyhow; he had set up both Barris and Luckman. He _had_ to walk.

"Where you going?" Luckman said.

"Donna's." Getting to her place on foot was almost impossible; saying this ensured neither man accompanying him. He put on his coat and set off toward the front door. "See you guys later."

"My car--" Barris continued by way of more copout.

"If I tried to drive your car," Arctor said, "I'd press the wrong b.u.t.ton and it'd float up over the Greater L.A. downtown area like the Goodyear blimp, and they'd have me dumping borate on oil-well fires."

"I'm glad you can appreciate my position," Barris was muttering as Arctor shut the door. Seated before the hologram cube of Monitor Two, Fred in his scramble suit watched impa.s.sively as the hologram changed continually before his eyes. In the safe apartment other watchers watched other holograms from other source points, mostly playbacks. Fred, however, watched a live hologram unfolding; it recorded, but he had by-pa.s.sed the stored tape to pick up the transmission at the instant it emanated from Bob Arctor's allegedly run-down house. Within the hologram, in broad-band color, with high resolution, sat Barris and Luckman. In the best chair in the living room, Barris sat bent over a hash pipe he had been putting together for days. His face had become a mask of concentration as he wound white string around and around the bowl of the pipe. At the coffee table Luckman hunched over a Swanson's chicken TV dinner, eating in big clumsy mouthfuls while he watched a western on TV. Four beer cans--empties--lay squashed by his mighty fist on the table; now he reached for a fifth half-full can, knocked it over, spilled it, grabbed it, and cursed. At the curse, Barris peered up, regarded him like Mime in _Siegfried_, then resumed work. Fred continued to watch.

"f.u.c.king late-night TV," Luckman gargled, his mouth full of food, and then suddenly he dropped his spoon and leaped staggering to his feet, tottered, spun toward Barris, both hands raised, gesturing, saying nothing, his mouth open and half-chewed food spilling from it onto his clothes, onto the floor. The cats ran forward eagerly. Barris halted in his hash-pipe making, gazed up at hapless Luckman. In a frenzy, now gargling horrid noises, Luckman with one hand swept the coffee table bare of beer cans and food; everything clattered down. The cats sped off, terrified. Still, Barris sat gazing fixedly at him. Luckman lurched a few steps toward the kitchen; the scanner there, on its cube before Fred's horrified eyes, picked up Luckman as he groped blindly in the kitchen semidarkness for a gla.s.s, tried to turn on the faucet and fill it with water. At the monitor, Fred jumped up; transfixed, on Monitor Two he saw Barris, still seated, return to painstakingly winding string around and around the bowl of his hash pipe. Barris did not look up again; Monitor Two showed him again intently at work. The aud tapes clashed out great breaking, tearing sounds of agony: human strangling and the furious din of objects. .h.i.tting the floor as Luckman hurled pots and pans and dishes and flatware about in an attempt to attract Barris's attention. Barris, amid the noise, continued methodically at his hash pipe and did not look up again. In the kitchen, on Monitor One, Luckman fell to the floor all at once, not slowly, onto his knees, but completely, with a sodden thump, and lay spread-eagled. Barris continued winding the string of his hash pipe, and now a small snide smile appeared on his face, at the corners of his mouth. On his feet, Fred stared in shock, galvanized and paralyzed simultaneously. He reached for the police phone beside the monitor, halted, still watched. For several minutes Luckman lay on the kitchen floor without moving as Barris wound and wound the string, Barris bent over like an intent old lady knitting, smiling to himself, smiling on and on, and rocking a trifle; then abruptly Barris tossed the hash pipe away, stood up, gazed acutely at Luckman's form on the kitchen floor, the broken water gla.s.s beside him, all the debris and pans and broken plates, and then Barris's face suddenly reacted with mock dismay. Barris tore off his shades, his eyes widened grotesquely, he flapped his arms in helpless fright, he ran about a little here and there, then scuttled toward Luckman, paused a few feet from him, ran back, panting now. He's building up his act, Fred realized. He's getting his panic-and-discovery act together. Like he just came onto the scene. Barris, on the cube of Monitor Two, twisted about, gasped in grief, his face dark red, and then he hobbled to the phone, yanked it up, dropped it, picked it up with trembling fingers . . . he has just discovered that Luckman, alone in the kitchen, has choked to death on a piece of food, Fred realized; with no one there to hear him or help him. And now Barris is frantically trying to summon help. Too late. Into the phone, Barris was saying in a weird, high-pitched slow voice, "Operator, is it called the inhalator squad or the resuscitation squad?"

"Sir," the phone tab squawked from its speaker by Fred, "is there someone unable to breathe? Do you wish--"

"It, I believe, is a cardiac arrest," Barris was saying now in his low, urgent, professional-type, calm voice into the phone, a voice deadly with awareness of peril and gravity and the running out of time. "Either that or involuntary aspiration of a bolus within the--"

"What is the address, sin?" the operator broke in.

"The address," Barris said, "let's see, the address is--"

Fred, aloud, standing, said, "Christ."

Suddenly Luckman, lying stretched out on the floor, heaved convulsively. He shuddered and then barfed up the material obstructing his throat, thrashed about, and opened his eyes, which stared in swollen confusion.

"Uh, he appears to be all right now," Barris said smoothly into the phone. "Thank you; no a.s.sistance is needed after all." He rapidly hung the phone up.

"Jeez," Luckman muttered thickly as he sat up. "f.u.c.k." He wheezed noisily, coughing and struggling for air.

"You okay?" Barris asked, in tones of concern.

"I must have gagged. Did I pa.s.s out?"

"Not exactly. You did go into an altered state of consciousness, though. For a few seconds. Probably an alpha state."

"G.o.d! I soiled myself!" Unsteadily, swaying with weakness, Luckman managed to get himself to his feet and stood rocking back and forth dizzily, holding on to the wall for support. "I'm really getting degenerate," he muttered in disgust. "Like an old wino." He headed toward the sink to wash himself, his steps uncertain. Watching all this, Fred felt the fear drain from him. The man would be okay. But Barris! What sort of person was he? Luckman had recovered despite him. What a freak, he thought. What a kinky freak. Where's his head at, just to stand idle like that?

"A guy could cash in that way," Luckman said as he splashed water on himself at the sink. Barris smiled.

"I got a really strong physical const.i.tution," Luckman said, gulping water from a cup. "What were you doing while I was lying there? Jacking off?"

"You saw me on the phone," Barris said. "Summoning the paramedics. I moved into action at--"

"b.a.l.l.s," Luckman said sourly, and went on gulping down fresh clean water. "I know what you'd do if I dropped dead-- you'd rip off my stash. You'd even go through my pockets."

"It's amazing," Barris said, "the limitation of the human anatomy, the fact that food and air must share a common pa.s.sage. So that the risk of--"

Silently, Luckman gave him the finger.

A screech of brakes. A horn. Bob Arctor looked swiftly up at the night traffic. A sports car, engine running, by the curb; inside it, a girl waving at him. Donna.

"Christ," he said again. He strode toward the curb. Opening the door of her MG, Donna said, "Did I scare you? I pa.s.sed you on my way to your place and then I flashed on it that it was you truckin' along, so I made a U-turn and came back. Get in."

Silently he got in and shut the car door.

"Why are you out roaming around?" Donna said. "Because of your car? It's still not fixed?"

"I just did a freaky number," Bob Arctor said. "Not like a fantasy trip. Just . . ." He shuddered. Donna said, "I have your stuff."

"What?" he said.

"A thousand tabs of death."

"_Death?_" he echoed.

"Yeah, high-grade death. I better drive." She shifted into low, took off and out onto the street; almost at once she was driving along too fast. Donna always drove too fast, and tailgated, but expertly.

"That f.u.c.king Barris!" he said. "You know how he works? He doesn't kill anybody he wants dead; he just hangs around until a situation arises where they die. And he just sits there while they die. In fact, he sets them up to die while he stays out of it. But I'm not sure how. Anyhow, he arranges to allow them to f.u.c.king die." He lapsed into silence then, brooding to himself. "Like," he said, "Barris wouldn't wire plastic explosives into the ignition system of your car. What he'd do--"

"Do you have the money?" Donna said. "For the stuff? It's really Primo, and I need the money right now. I have to have it tonight because I have to pick up some other things."

"Sure." He had it in his wallet.

"I don't like Barris," Donna said as she drove, "and I don't trust him. You know, he's crazy. And when you're around him you're crazy too. And then when you're not around him you're okay. You're crazy right now."

"I am?" he said, startled.

"Yes," Donna said calmly.

"Well," he said. "Jesus." He did not know what to say to that. Especially since Donna was never wrong.

"Hey," Donna said with enthusiasm, "could you take me to a rock concert? At the Anaheim Stadium next week? Could you?"

"Right on," he said mechanically. And then it flashed on him what Donna had said--asking him to take her out. "_AlIl riiiight!_" he said, pleased; life flowed back into him. Once again, the little dark-haired chick whom he loved so much had restored him to caring. "Which night?"

"It's Sunday afternoon. I'm going to bring some of that oily dark hash and get really loaded. They won't know the difference; there'll be thousands of heads there." She glanced at him, critically. "But you've got to wear something neat, not those funky clothes you sometimes put on. I mean--" Her voice softened. "I want you to look foxy because you are foxy."

"Okay," he said, charmed.

"I'm taking us to my place," Donna said as she shot along through the night in her little car, "and you do have the money and you will give it to me, and then we'll drop a few of the tabs and kick back and get really mellow, and maybe you'd like to buy us a fifth of Southern Comfort and we can get bombed as well."

"Oh wow," he said, with sincerity.

"What I really genuinely want to do tonight," Donna said as she shifted down and swiveled the car onto her own street and into her driveway, "is go to a drive-in movie. I bought a paper and read what's on, but I couldn't find anything good except at the Torrance Drive-in, but it's already started. It started at five-thirty. b.u.mmer."

He examined his watch. "Then we've missed--"

"No, we could still see most of it." She shot him a warm smile as she stopped the car and shut off the engine. "It's all the _Planet of the Apes_ pictures, all eleven of them; they run from 7:30 P.M. all the way through to 8 A.M. tomorrow morning. I'll go to work directly from the drive-in, so I'll have to change now. We'll sit there at the movie loaded and drinking Southern Comfort all night. Wow, can you dig it?" She peered at him hopefully.

"All right," he echoed.

"Yeah yeah yeah." Donna hopped out and came around to help him open his little door. "When did you last see all the _Planet of the Apes_ pictures? I saw most of them earlier this year, but then I got sick toward the last ones and had to split. It was a ham sandwich they vended me there at the drive-in. That really made me mad; I missed the last picture, where they reveal that all the famous people in history like Lincoln and Nero were secretly apes and running all human history from the start. That's why I want to go back now so bad." She lowered her voice as they walked toward her front door. "They burned me by vending that ham sandwich, so what I did--don't rat on me--the next time we went to the drive-in, the one in La Habra, I stuck a bent coin in the slot and a couple more in other vending machines for good measure. Me and Larry Talling--you remember Larry, I was going with him?--bent a whole bunch of quarters and fifty-cent pieces using his vise and a big wrench. I made sure all the vending machines were owned by the same firm, of course, and then we f.u.c.ked up a bunch of them, practically all of them, if the truth were known." She unlocked her front door with her key, slowly and gravely, in the dim light.

"It is not good policy to burn you, Donna," he said as they entered her small neat place.

"Don't step on the s.h.a.g carpet," Donna said.

"Where'll I step, then?"

"Stand still, or on the newspapers."

"Donna--"

"Now don't give me a lot of heavy s.h.i.t about having to walk on the newspapers. Do you know how much it cost me to get my carpet shampooed?" She stood unb.u.t.toning her jacket.

"Thrift," he said, taking off his own coat. "French peasant thrift. Do you ever throw anything away? Do you keep pieces of string too short for any--"

"Someday," Donna said, shaking her long black hair back as she slid out of her leather jacket, "I'm going to get married and I'll need all that, that I've put away. When you get married you need everything there is. Like, we saw this big mirror in the yard next door; it took three of us over an hour to get it over the fence. Someday--"

"How much of what you've got put away did you buy," he asked, "and how much did you steal?"

"_Buy?_" She studied his face uncertainly. "What do you mean by _buy?_"

"Like when you buy dope," he said. "A dope deal. Like now." He got out his wallet. "I give you money, right?"

Donna nodded, watching him obediently (actually, more out of politeness) but with dignity. With a certain reserve.

"And then you hand me a bunch of dope for it," he said, holding out the bills. "What I mean by buy is an extension into the greater world of human business transactions of what we have present now, with us, as dope deals."

"I think I see," she said, her large dark eyes placid but alert. She was willing to learn.

"How many--like when you ripped off that Coca-Cola truck you were tailgating that day--how many bottles of c.o.ke did you rip off? How many crates?"

"A month's worth," Donna said. "For me and my friends."

He glared at her reprovingly.

"It's a form of barter," she said.

"What do--" He started to laugh. "What do you give back?"

"I give of myself."

Now he laughed out loud. "To who? To the driver of the truck, who probably had to make good--"

"The Coca-Cola Company is a capitalist monopoly. No one else can make c.o.ke but them, like the phone company does when you want to phone someone. They're all capitalist monopolies. Do you know"--her dark eyes flashed--"that the formula for Coca-Cola is a carefully guarded secret handed down through the ages, known only to a few persons all in the same family, and when the last of them dies that's memorized the formula, there will be no more c.o.ke? So there's a backup written formula in a safe somewhere," she added meditatively. "I wonder where," she ruminated to herself, her eyes flickering.

"You and your rip-off friends will never find the Coca-Cola formula, not in a million years."

"WHO THE f.u.c.k WANTS TO MANUFACTURE c.o.kE ANYHOW WHEN YOU CAN RIP IT OFF THEIR TRUCKS? They've got a lot of trucks. You see them driving constantly, real slow. I tailgate them every chance I get; it makes them mad." She smiled a secret, cunning, lovely little impish smile at him, as if trying to beguile him into her strange reality, where she tailgated and tailgated a slow truck and got madder and madder and more impatient and then, when it pulled off, instead of shooting on by like other drivers would, she pulled off too, and stole everything the truck had on it. Not so much because she was a thief on even for revenge but because by the time it finally pulled off she had looked at the crates of c.o.ke so long that she had figured out what she could do with all of them. _Her impatience had returned to ingenuity_. She had loaded her car--not the MG but the larger Camaro she had been driving then, before she had totaled it--with crates and crates of c.o.ke, and then for a month she and all her jerk friends had drunk all the free c.o.ke they wanted to, and then after that-- She had turned the empties back in at different stores for the deposits.

"What'd you do with the bottle caps?" he once asked her. "Wrap them in muslin and store them away in your cedar chest?"

"I threw them away," Donna said glumly. "There's nothing you can do with c.o.ke bottle caps. There's no contests or anything any more." Now she disappeared into the other room, returned presently with several polyethylene bags. "You wanta count these?" she inquired. "There's a thousand _for sure_. I weighed them on my gram scale before I paid for them."

"It's okay," he said. He accepted the bags and she accepted the money and he thought, Donna, once more I could send you up, but I probably never will no matter what you do even if you do it to me, because there is something wonderful and full of life about you and sweet and I would never destroy it. I don't understand it, but there it is.

"Could I have ten?" she asked.

"Ten? Ten tabs back? Sure." He opened one of the bags--it was hard to untie, but he had the skill--and counted her out precisely ten. And then ten for himself. And retied the bag. And then carried all the bags to his coat in the closet.

"You know what they do in ca.s.sette-tape stores now?" Donna said energetically when he returned. The ten tabs were nowhere in sight; she had already stashed them. "Regarding tapes?"

"They arrest you," he said, "if you steal them."

"They always did that. Now what they do--you know when you carry an LP or a tape to the counter and the clerk removes the little price tag that's gummed on? Well, guess what. Guess what I found out almost the hard way." She threw herself down in a chair, grinning in antic.i.p.ation, and brought forth a foil-wrapped tiny cube, which he identified as a fragment of hash even before she unwrapped it. "That isn't only a gummed-on price sticker. There's also a tiny fragment of some kind of alloy in it, and if that sticker isn't removed by the clerk at the counter, and you try to get out through the door with it, then an alarm goes off."

"How did you find out almost the hard way?"

"Some teenybopper tried to walk out with one under her coat ahead of me and the alarm went off and they grabbed her and the pigs came."

"How many did _you_ have under your coat?"

"Three."

"Did you also have dope in your car?" he said. "Because once they got you for the tape rip-off, they'd impound your car, because you'd be downtown looking out, and the car would be routinely towed away and then they'd find the dope and send you up for that, too. I'll bet that wasn't locally, either; I'll bet you did that where--" He had started to say, Where you don't know anybody in law enforcement who would intervene. But he could not say that, because he meant himself; were Donna even busted, at least where he had any pull, he would work his a.s.s off to help her. But he could do nothing, say, up in L.A. County. And if it ever happened, which eventually it would, there it would happen: too fan off for him to hear or help. He had a scenario start rolling in his head then, a horror fantasy: Donna, much like Luckman, dying with no one hearing or caring or doing anything; they might hear, but they, like Barris, would remain impa.s.sive and inert until for her it was all over. She would not literally die, as Luckman had--had? He meant _might_. But she, being an addict to Substance D, would not only be in jail but she would have to withdraw, cold turkey. And since she was dealing, not just using--and there was a rap for theft as well--she would be in for a while, and a lot of other things, dreadful things, would happen to her. So when she came back out she would be a different Donna. The soft, careful expression that he dug so much, the warmth--that would be altered into G.o.d knew what, anyhow something empty and too much used. Donna translated into a thing; and so it went, for all of them someday, but for Donna, he hoped, far and away beyond his own lifetime. And not where he couldn't help.

"s.p.u.n.ky," he said to her now, unhappily, "without Spooky."

"What's that?" After a moment she understood. "Oh, that TA therapy. But when I do hash . . ." She had gotten out her very own little round ceramic hash pipe, like a sand dollar, which she had made herself, and was lighting it. "Then I'm Sleepy." Gazing up at him, bright-eyed and happy, she laughed and extended to him the precious hash pipe. "I'll supercharge you," she declared. "Sit down."

As he seated himself, she rose to her feet, stood puffing the hash pipe into lively activity, then waddled at him, bent, and as he opened his mouth--like a baby bird, he thought, as he always thought when she did this--she exhaled great gray forceful jets of hash smoke into him, filling him with her own hot and bold and incorrigible energy, which was at the same time a pacifying agent that relaxed and mellowed them both out together: she who supercharged and Bob Arctor who received.

"I love you, Donna," he said. This supercharging, this was the subst.i.tute for s.e.xual relations with her that he got, and maybe it was better; it was worth so much; it was so intimate, and very strange viewed that way, because first she could put something inside him, and then, if she wanted, he put something into her. An even exchange, back and forth, until the hash ran out.

"Yeah, I can dig it, your being in love with me," she said, chuckled, sat down beside him, grinning, to take a hit from the hash pipe now, for herself.

9.

"Hey, Donna, man," he said. "Do you like cats?"

She blinked, red-eyed. "Dripping little things. Moving along about a foot above the ground."