“Eric?” The walls righted themselves, snapshot frozen, the instant you opened the door. “What was that?”
You’re a silhouette in the doorway, but I can see your eyes in spite of the light flooding mine.
“Just talking to Otto,” I said.
“Come outside, you should meet everyone.”
“One second.”
You blew me a kiss, then closed the door.
My heart beats faster at the sight of you, my blood sings at the sound of your voice and I don’t want to move from this bed. I don’t want to disturb your phantom skin against mine.
“This stuff is beautiful,” Otto said. “Only God could have done better. Is there something I should know about you?”
“You know too much.”
“Relax. I’ve known Desiree since I was a pup. She’s been my best friend since she saved me from three brothers, five sisters and no father.”
“Sad story.”
“But typical.”
“And you’re clean?”
“You mean tapeworms? I’m clean. Desiree sees to that.” Otto dropped his pants and hiked up his shirt. He did not ask me to return the courtesy.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“Just what I said.”
“What’s your relationship with her?”
“You and I have business, buddy. Piles of cash with our names on it.” He buckled his belt. “Quit sniffing my ass and speak English.”
“Are you now, or have you ever been, sexually involved with Desiree?”
“No. Not even close. She’s got nice legs, I’ll give her that. But she’s not my type. She takes care of me and I look after her. I’m protective, that way. If you want her, make your move, but you’d be wise to ditch the jealousy. It’ll cloud your thinking. Besides, she doesn’t know you made this stuff, and you’re never going to tell her.” He tapped the mirror, sending silver ripples through the glass.
“This is good,” he said.
“You see what I see?”
“Yes. What do you call it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Mad Hatter,” said Otto.
“I’m not following you.”
“The best batch in the world won’t go anywhere without a good name. If you’re ever at a loss, you can’t go wrong with a reference to Alice.”
“Thanks for the advice.”
“Can you do it again?”
“These were an experiment. I was trying something different.”
“A fortunate mistake. Can you do it again?”
“Of course. I’m just not set up for it. What little gear I’ve got has miles of wear on it, and the rest is hacked together from scrap.”
I was using athletic water bottles for sep funnels. Junk stores and yard sales had yielded three vintage chemistry sets from which I’d salvaged lab-grade glass. They don’t make those anymore, because of guys like me.
“Let me show you something.” Otto took a candle from the dresser. There were four or five of them, and none had ever been lit. Its underside had been hollowed out. He removed a roll of bills as thick as his own wrist.
“I can set you up,” he said. “Get you all the gear you want, get you safe and isolated.”
“Put that back,” I said.
“It’s not hers. It’s mine.”
“She holds your money for you?”
He said nothing, tossing the fat roll up and down.
“She doesn’t know it’s here?” I said.
“No, she doesn’t. That’s not all of it. I spread it around.”
“You’re safe until she lights that candle.”
“She won’t. Listen,” he pressed the roll of bills into my hand, “I can unload whatever else you’ve got for three times what you’re selling it for, five or six times what it cost you to make it. I can make it worth your while.”
“I should get out there.”
I don’t remember the occasion, much less the names and faces of everyone present. I do remember your friends coasting on the acid they knew I’d brought but didn’t know I’d made.
They sought me out until I took refuge in your room, and did the same when I returned to the group. Where did you get this? Can you get more?
Along with the hand-holding circles, face touching, rambling on about the beauty of the universe and the presence of God in all things, they had a Darwinian appreciation for me and my contribution. As my stature rose within the group, so did your proximity to me, from touching my shoulder during conversation, to leaning at my side or sitting on my lap, to holding my hand as you said your good-byes at the end of the night after the Mad Hatters had burned off in a clean, thirty-minute comedown.
“Are you staying?” You pressed your nose into my neck.
“I’m going to run out for a bit,” I said, and you wrapped your arms around me. “I’ll be right back, I’m just getting some wine.” Your hold grew tighter. You said no.
“I promise, just give me a minute.”
“How long?”
“Half an hour.”
“Take Otto with you. For collateral.”
“Is he staying too?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
You kissed me. For the length of the kiss, the Mad Hatters came back.
“If you follow the news,” Otto rode shotgun, talking in an auctioneer’s blue streak, “busts are almost always in the inner cities. If you trust the numbers about the drug economy, and believe that it’s purely an inner-city problem, then the streets of ghettos and barrios would be swamped with dealers, and the buyers would queue up like an East German bread line.
“The major shit moves through here,” he said. He’d guided me into suburbia. Skin-colored houses with white pickups and boats in their driveways. “And I mean major.”
He reached into the backseat and heaved a black duffle the size of a small tree stump into his lap. Beneath two layers of waterproof canvas and nylon lay an ingot of bills. They were sheathed in plastic, the top layer all Jacksons.
“This time, it isn’t mine. I’m a way station.”
“Zip that up.” My eyes went to the rearview mirror out of instinct. Every pair of headlights was cause for alarm. “Now.”
“All twenties. Nonsequential and unmarked. I’ve checked ’em, I know.” He closed the inner and outer bags and said, “this thing weighs thirty-five pounds. You want to know how much this totals?”
“No.”
“Whatever. You’re the only other person I’ve told about it. I gotta deliver it tonight and they’re going to count it, every last bill. You’ll find out.”
“I’ll wait outside.”
“Relax. You’ll like these people.”
We made two stops, maybe three. Some details are sharper than others, and they all run together. The houses were the same, I remember, white walls, white carpets, and children’s art projects on the refrigerators. Each visit, someone offered us a light beer and a seat on the couch in front of a wide-screen television where I waited while Otto exchanged one bag for another.
Otto’s people drove minivans with baby seats, their floors littered with fast-food wrappers, school newsletters and sports equipment. They owned boats and jet skis, campers and trucks with bumper stickers broadcasting their political party or proclaiming their children’s honor-student status. They wore Little League coaching windbreakers and T-shirts branded with water-ski equipment dealers or lake resorts. They had gold credit cards, frequent-flyer miles, golf clubs, satellite dishes, video games, swimming pools and dirt bikes.
They told sad stories, stories about playing football in high school or sexual conquests in college, about the concerts they’d seen and how much they drank, about the long hair or the earring they once had. They told stories about the muscle car they had as a teenager, about the band they played in or the bike they used to race.
The details are as blurry as they are dull. What remains vivid above all else is the size of the duffle bags Otto was moving, the bets he place
d on games during the stops, and our handshake agreement on the drive back. We were in business.
You were staring at the moon from your front yard when the lights from my Galaxie flared against your hair like a torch.
“That was more than half an hour.” You grabbed my belt buckle and pulled me into you. “I wasn’t sure you were coming back.”
“I thought you were a fortune-teller.”
“People tell their fortunes for me. I just listen, give them a few details and they fill in the blank spots. They think it’s all me, but it’s not. They believe what they want to.”
“You must be good if you make a living at it.”
You took my hands, laced your fingers with mine and pulled them behind your back, locking us together. The tip of your nose brushed my face and it felt cold, so I kissed it.
“You kissed my nose.”
“It was cold.”
“Are you trying to seduce me?”
“You’ll know.”
“Will I, now?”
“Yes. All of your willpower will dissolve when I decide to seduce you.” I kept a straight face for as long as I could, but you started laughing.
I pulled away but you took my bottom lip in your teeth and held me there. You let go after a moment, looking over my shoulder to the Galaxie where Otto lingered.
“Otto, stay,” you said, then kissed me again. “You too. Don’t worry, he’s on the couch.”
I remember my hand on the sweat-slick small of your back, your wet leg slung over mine and “hold still” hot-whispered into my ear and I did but you couldn’t and you moaned my name, lost in the teeth marks you left on my chest. I drank dark wine pooled in the cleft of your back and licked every inch of you, then held you until your breathing told me you were asleep, but you never let go of me.
twelve
THE TYRANNOSAURUS HAD COLLAPSED INTO A MANGLED HEAP, ITS LEGS BLOWN from beneath it after decades of drunken target practice. Its bullet-pocked body lay in a pile of broken concrete amid spent shell casings, bottle shards, hubcaps and sagebrush, the exposed rebar skeleton baking under the desert sun. Otto emptied his bladder into the monster’s dead, frozen jaw.
“Whaddaya think used to be here?”
He shifted his stance to coat the face and neck while he spoke. The smell stung my nostrils and I moved upwind. Fifty feet from Otto, an empty swimming pool lay in front of a row of abandoned motel rooms.
“A gas station,” I said.
“That looks like a swimming pool.” Otto zipped up and walked to the concrete cavity half filled with tumbleweeds.
“Swimming pools have water in them.”
“Definitely a pool,” he said, surveying from the edge with the gravity of a plane crash investigator. “This was a motel of some kind.”
“I envy your keen sense of the obvious, Otto.”
“Dinosaurs ate all of the tourists, before target practice from the locals drove them to extinction.” He unzipped his pants again, and pissed into the layer of mud below. “Then for a while it was a tumbleweed brothel.”
“What are you doing?”
“Marking my territory.”
We’d been on the road for over three hours, enduring the Mojave heat. The Galaxie had been painted with eight coats of factory crimson and loaded with four new whitewalls. With less than 8,000 miles on a rebuilt engine, it was in perfect working order, except for the air-conditioning. I’d brought a bag full of bottled water, sunblock and spare T-shirts, and had sweat through four of them.
Signs throughout the desert had warned of the dangers of flash floods and hitchhikers. A truck tire had been submerged halfway into the dirt where we’d parked, then painted white, with BUS STOP in red letters. The road stretched to the horizon in both directions with nobody coming from either. Anyone expecting a bus would die waiting.
“I don’t like being late,” I said, checking my watch.
“Breathe, buddy.” Otto zipped up again. “We’re less than four miles away. Let’s toss the Frisbee.”
“We’re four miles away but you couldn’t wait. Jesus. I don’t want to toss anything, I want to move. Are you finished?”
“Maybe. I want to sniff around for a minute.”
“There’s a chance you might find an actual toilet,” I said. “I’m going to make a call.”
“From where?”
A gas station stood adjacent to the motel, the parking lot more potholes than asphalt. One of four pumps lay on its side, ripped from the ground by a drunken dinosaur hunter behind the wheel of a pickup. Nobody had removed the GAS COLD SODAS ICE sign at the edge of the highway though someone had boarded up the windows and spray-painted FOR SALE across the plywood. The phone booth, however, was pristine, with the receiver on the hook and not so much as a crack in the glass, as though it had been installed that morning.
“There’s a phone,” I said. “Over there.”
“It’s abandoned.”
“I’m not getting an oil change. Wave when you’re done sniffing”
Otto started toward the dilapidated motel rooms and shouted, “Watch for dinosaurs.”
I slid the door shut and sealed out the midday silence of the desert. I heard my blood rushing through my ears, then the hum of the wires, the sleepy rasp of your voice.
“Did I wake you?”
“It’s okay. I was just napping. How did your interview go?”
“It’s in about half an hour. I’m not worried. How’s business on the promenade?”
“Slow night downtown. What’s the position you’re interviewing for?”
“Short-term consulting. Lab stuff I don’t want to bore you with.”
“No, it’s fascinating. You can tell me.”
Christ, leave it alone.
“I don’t know the exact nature of the contract. Are you working later?”
“No, I was hoping to see you. Are you coming back?”
Maybe. I didn’t know where I was going, with whom I was meeting, whether I’d make my next call from jail or the return trip in my own trunk. Throughout the drive, the scenarios ran through my brain in ceaseless succession. Otto was a cop. An informant. He worked for a rival chemist. I should confront him. I should abandon him. Each notion negated by its own idiocy the instant it surfaced.
“There’s a chance I’ll need to meet someone else tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll find a hotel and crash for the night, then drive back tomorrow afternoon.”
“No.” Your plea melted me. “Come over tonight and you can drive back tomorrow morning.”
“You want me to double back to Riverside twice in two days?”
“I want to see you.”
“I want to see you too. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“Please. I won’t keep you up late, I promise.”
The feeling of being so wanted was new to me.
“I’ll do what I can. I should go now.”
“Hey,” you said. “What color are my eyes?”
“Come on. Don’t do that.”
In that second, the wire stretching from the desert to your bed became infinite, and every word was a ripple in the middle of the ocean that became a crashing wave thousands of miles away. I spoke too quickly and I could hear my resentment crash down on you from a distance.
“I’m sorry,” you said. “I miss you. I’ll see you whenever you get back, okay?”
“Your eyes are green.”
“Good guess.”
I could hear you smile through the wires.
“Bluish green.”
“You’re sounding like a palm reader.”
I’d taken a photograph from your refrigerator and dropped it into my bag before I’d left, a snapshot of you laughing somewhere warm and sunny with an umbrella drink in your hand, but I didn’t need it. Just as it did when I spoke to you that day from the phone, your face comes into focus more and more as I hold you here beside me.
“There’s a large speck in the blue green of your right eye. A small bump on the bridge of you
r nose. A lock of your hair always falls over one eye, and you’ve got a tiny mole on your right cheek, right on the corner of your smile.”
“You have quite a memory.”
“My memory’s terrible,” I said. “But I can picture you when I hear your voice.”
“I’ll help you with your memory.”
“Fill in the blank spots?”
“Yeah. That’s what I’m good at.”
“So long as I can see you.”
“In your mind or in person?”
“Both.”
You sighed, and the waves going over the wire washed me with calm.
“I miss you.” You broke the silence. “Please come back tonight, if you can.”
“I’ll try. I miss you too.”
We said our good-byes. I listened to the electric monotone of the dead line for a minute before I hung up. I opened the glass floodgates and the miles of silence crashed through.
The house had been trashed, abandoned, boarded up, squatted in, sold, reoccupied, raided, reabandoned and reboarded. Otto and I waited on the porch, four miles up the road from the ghost motel. The sky looked bigger, a stretch of luminous blue with clouds so massive I didn’t know how they stayed in the air.
“It’s sturdy,” Otto said, like a child telling himself there’s nothing under the bed or in the closet. “You’ll know when someone’s coming and they won’t be able to get in easily.”
“If the Feds are coming, it doesn’t matter how sturdy it is,” I said.
“I’m not talking about the Feds. I’m talking about people who are pissed and looking for you. I’m talking about home invasions and payback.”
“Otto, who are we working for?”
Somebody named Hoyle ran everything. The supply chain, the distribution chain and everyone involved. Hoyle’s word was final. Hoyle didn’t want acid. Acid didn’t make people want more acid. Hoyle wanted the things that woke up the slumbering instinct for More, and woke it with a vengeance. Otto had never met Hoyle. He knew someone who had, and for whom we were waiting.
A wake of desert dirt billowed from the tires of a white van. I know that van, though I’ve never seen it before. My memory’s stuck in a loop because I’m remembering things that haven’t happened yet, the order of events from yesterday and the day before collapse into the events prior to the fire. Here and now collide with then and there and, for a second, Manhattan White and Toe Tag are standing in my room at the Firebird with flames engulfing everything while I lie with my arms around you in the middle of nowhere. The moment passes, each note of memory arranging itself from noise to symphony.