Rummies

  When the meeting was over, the contingent from banner was instructed to stay in their seats until the room had cleared.

  "What are we," Duke asked Gwen, "contagious?"

  "There are dangerous people here," she said.

  "There are?"

  "Like that . . . Ferlin. People who haven't been sober as long as you have. How do I know he's not carrying or using or even dealing?"

  "He looked okay to me."

  "The devil has a large wardrobe, Duke. Always remember that."

  As they lined up to board the bus, Preston murmured to Lupone, "Think Marcia got it?"

  "The spade lady? She was there?"

  "You didn't see her?"

  "Hell, no."

  "What'd you think I was doing?"

  "Pulling their chains. What else?"

  On the ride back to the clinic, Gwen held forth from the front of the bus and explained the different abuse patterns reflected in all the different stories they had heard. She praised Preston for having spoken and said she could see that God had made a little crack in his armor, and if he kept opening that crack a bit more every day, there was still a chance he would receive his medallion, after all.

  Something woke Preston. He looked at the luminous dial on his watch: two-thirty. He heard Twist making sounds like a bear with asthma, and he vowed (as he did every time Twist's snoring woke him) that this morning he would ask Guy Larkin to requisition a pair of nose clips for Twist.

  He threw off the covers and stood up and was about to bend down and clamp off Twist's nose—which usually forced Twist to grumble and change position and bury his face in his pillow, which usually stopped the snoring for a while—when he heard a faint scratching on the window.

  It might have been a branch blowing against the windowpane, but there were no trees beside the window and he had never known a breeze to blow here at night.

  He padded softly to the window. He saw nothing, so he opened the window and stuck his head out.

  Something touched his arm. He lurched backward and struck his head on the window frame.

  It was Marcia, flattened against the wall. She pointed to the far end of the building, where a cigarette glowed. They waited—Marcia against the wall, Preston leaning on the windowsill—until the tiny orange light vanished around the comer of the building.

  She gestured for him to follow her, so he pulled on his trousers, climbed out the window and tailed her across the sand.

  Her car was hidden in a hollow a hundred yards from the building. Its tires were almost flat, for she had driven across the desert and had let most of the air out so she could maintain traction on the shifting granular ground.

  “You did good," she whispered when they were far from the clinic. "No wonder all you Yalies went into the CIA."

  Before he could say anything, she opened the back door and gestured inside the car and said, "Got a present for you."

  Someone lay on the back seat, breathing deeper than sleep. Unconscious. Or comatose. Preston leaned in and looked.

  Chuck.

  XVII

  It was like trying to close an overstuffed suitcase. Big slabs of Chuck kept flopping out—an arm, a leg, his head—until the three of them pushed together and finally crammed all of him into the shower stall and turned on the water and shut the door.

  Preston and Marcia had barely been able to roll him out of the car, couldn't possibly have lugged him all the way back to the clinic, so Preston had woken Twist, and they had half-carried, half-dragged him across the sand and squeezed him through the window.

  Now he lay curled up in the shower stall, a great mass of reeking meat, and they waited for the hot water to steam him back to consciousness.

  ''What's he on?" Preston asked.

  ''Smorgasbord," said Marcia. "Little bit of everything."

  "I'd say juice, mostly," said Twist. "Christ . . . smell the man. I wonder where he was tryin' to get to."

  "Oblivion," Marcia said. "Looks like he made it, too."

  Dan had urged her, begged her, to try to get their jobs back for them, so though she knew from the outset that the hope was vain, she had tried. She tried to see Lawrence Tomlinson and was refused an appointment. She drove up to Xanadu to see Banner, but Chuck turned her back at the gate, nicely—reluctantly, embarrassedly—but obviously he had been instructed to keep her away from Banner, on pain of losing his own job.

  She lodged a protest at the county level, then with the state, but found herself swimming in a sea of procrastination and buck-passing. She made inquiries at the various associations of mental-health professionals, but they all refused to take a case based only on innuendo and inferences drawn from Tomlinson's carefully crafted letter.

  She was angry enough to go public with a charge of racial discrimination, but a friend of a friend, a woman who was going out with one of Tomlinson's flunkies, let her know that silence would be the course of wisdom: No, the Banner board wouldn't write letters of recommendation for her and Dan, but on the other hand, if she kept her mouth shut they wouldn't pour poison in the ears of the administrators of the other thousand or so clinics across the land.

  She had applications out to sixteen rehab centers, from New Jersey to California.

  Dan, meanwhile, was taking a course in fixing transmissions so he could work at AAMCO. He had always liked cars.

  She had started doing volunteer work with a “Just Say No" program, cruising around, making friends with kids, shooting the breeze, finding a basketball if they wanted to play, convincing a merchant to permit them to put a hoop up in his parking lot. That kind of thing.

  That's how she had begun to see Chuck, just hanging around. At first, she had thought he was Twelfth-Stepping—keeping his own memory green by spreading the word—and she had stayed away from him so nobody could deduce a conspiracy of grown-ups.

  Then he had shown up in that red Porsche, and she had smelled rot. He gave everybody rides, let some of the kids drive it even, and it was like he was some sort of Pied Piper, always with a knot of kids around him.

  She stopped him on the street a day or two ago and let him know that the Porsche was spreading the wrong message, it was bad news, because what it was telling the kids was: Happiness is money. And these kids knew only one way to get money. For crissakes.

  And Chuck—nice Chuck, friendly Chuck, Chuck who had known so much pain of his own but still seemed to feel her pain when she was fired—had told her to fuck ofl^ and mind her own business. With eyes whose pupils were the size of pinpoints, as if light—the tiniest atom of light—hurt. With a voice that came from somewhere deep in his guts, and a tongue that lagged a fraction behind every word it wanted to utter.

  Last night she had seen the Porsche parked in a courtyard of a half-finished condo complex. Its hubcaps were gone, and someone had bent the radio antenna in half.

  Today, driving back from the unemployment office, she had seen it parked behind a roadhouse. She went inside, and in the dark, sour-smelling bar was Chuck, smashed out of his mind, lurching with a list, playing darts for money with two truckdrivers. As she watched, he lost and couldn't pay up, had run out of money, so the two truckdrivers slammed him up against the dart board, and while one of them held him, the other threw darts at him. They didn't have to hold him, though, because Chuck thought the game was hilarious. He ducked the first two darts, but the third one hit him in the chest, in one of those pectoral muscles the size of a standing rib roast. He pulled it out and tossed it back to the truckdriver and said something like “Try again, asshole, I bet you can't hit me in the eye."

  She tried to get the bartender to stop it, but he said, '*Are you crazy, lady? I don't need to have my place turned into a pile of matchsticks. Besides, they're having fun, no harm done."

  By now she figured she had to find out what had gone wrong, what had pushed Chuck over the edge, this guy whose sobriety was as precious to him as his soul— hell, he used to say his sobriety was his soul.

  She couldn't go to the clinic, k
new nobody there would take a call from her.

  Then she remembered the schedule, the A.A. meeting, and decided to go. Maybe it would be a waste of time, maybe she wouldn't learn anything. But it was better than sitting alone in a pasteboard condo, wishing she had a drink and listening to a symphony of flushing toilets.

  Afterwards, once she had received Preston's message, she had no trouble finding Chuck. The red Porsche was in a ditch beside a vacant lot. She found a couple of kids who helped her roll him from his car into hers.

  Now that they had him, what did Preston need him for?

  Preston told her everything he knew, then said, *'I don't know, though. Suppose Banner's already fired him.”

  “I doubt it," Marcia said. *'That's the great thing about us chronics: You're humble enough, there's always another chance." She thought for a moment, and a look of loathing leavened by sorrow passed over her face. ''How's Priscilla?"

  "Shitty," Twist said.

  “Living somewhere else," Preston said, "in some twilight zone. Going through the motions."

  Marcia nodded. "You see it in abused kids. Something inside them tells them they have to get away or they won't survive. It's usually a real mess, a lot of irrational guilt, a sense that they deserved it, but whatever it is is intolerable. They can't escape physically, so they run away mentally. They create a secret safe place, and that's where they live."

  "What brings them back?"

  "Time, if you pull them out of the situation and give them real safety. If you don't, sometimes they don't come back. They keep going."

  Preston could feel the pulse in his temples. "Where to?"

  "New people. They'll create a new person. The brain can't deal with the real person, can't take the overload of shit, so it creates a new person that doesn't know anything about it. Remember Three Faces of Eve? Remember Sybil?”

  "Jesus . . ."

  Marcia put a hand on his arm. "We're not there yet. We'll make her safe."

  There was a crash in the bathroom, and the sound of the plastic door panel exploding out of the shower stall, and a roar of an enraged hippopotamus.

  Preston and Marcia jumped. They stood between the beds, looking at each other.

  Twist smiled. He rolled off his bed and pulled the table between the beds out from the wall and unplugged the brass lamp. Glass broke in the bathroom, and there was the sound of Chuck falling and cursing and struggling to his feet. Twist very calmly removed the shade from the brass lamp and unscrewed the bulb and wrapped the cord around the base of the lamp and gripped the lamp by its slender neck and tested its heft.

  When he was seven years old, Preston had seen the original version of The Thing, and after he peed himself he went up the aisle and stood by the usher, who had seen the picture probably a hundred times.

  He recalled it now, for standing in the bathroom doorway was The Thing incarnate, hulking, staggering, dripping wet and grunting with a lust to inflict grievous injury.

  Twist shouldered past Preston and Marcia and stood facing Chuck, swinging the heavy lamp at his side.

  “How you doin'. Chuck?" he said.

  “Bhaaa ..." said Chuck.

  "Know what you mean. You must have a head 'bout the size of a fiickin' Buick."

  “Bhaaa ..." Chuck said again, and he swung a random punch that did nothing but cause him to lose his balance and carom off the doorjamb.

  "Now, Chuck," Twist said, "here's what it is. You're a big motherfucker, I'll give you alla that, but lemme tell you what. Scott here, and Marcia, they gonna dance around you and hassle the shit outa you, like mongooses, till I get inside and fetch you upside the head with this here heavy sumbitch, which gonna make your head feel even worser. So what say we cool right down. Chuck, and have us a talk?"

  Chuck said "Bhaaa ..." once more and tipped backward and sat down on the floor with a thud that made the toilet seat jump.

  “Atta boy." Twist turned to Preston and said, “All yours."

  Preston asked Twist to fetch some coffee from the brewer in the common room. Then he sat cross-legged on the floor outside the bathroom door and talked to Chuck. He told him what Lupone had said about Banner. He told him what had happened to Priscilla. Then he repeated it all twice more, hoping that fragments would pierce the fog in Chuck's head and somehow assemble themselves, like a jigsaw puzzle, into a comprehensible picture. He deferred asking any questions until Chuck had had two cups of coffee and washed his face and run some toothpaste around his mouth and drunk about half a gallon of water.

  When Chuck was cleaned up, they took him into the bedroom and sat him on Twist's bed. Marcia offered him a cigarette. As he reached for it, his hand trembled so badly that he shook his head and clasped his hands together and dropped them into his lap. She lit the cigarette for him and put it between his lips.

  He smiled bitterly and said, “You know what I am? A-"

  “A human being," said Marcia. “And it's no damn bargain."

  Chuck talked then, unprompted and uninterrupted. As much as Preston wanted to edit him, wanted to urge him to cut to the chase and tell them what he knew about Natasha and Banner and about the details of the award ceremony, he knew that Chuck had to talk in his own way, at his own pace (perhaps with some gentle guidance if he strayed too far into the backwaters of his childhood), if he was to resolve his conflicts and come to the conviction that he would help them.

  And need him they did, for without him they would be helpless to bring Banner down.

  Chuck recited the familiar facts about his career in the NFL and his discovery of the ephemeral joys of cocaine.

  Preston was smoking a cigarette and barely listening when, at the end of that chapter, Chuck said, "Nobody knows this, but I was s'posed to go on trial when I got outa here, possession with intent. Stone said he could do a deal with the court if I'd come work for him, stay under his supervision. What did I want, serve three-to-five or drive a car for him? Shit, that was an easy choice."

  For the first year, there were no problems. About halfway through the second year, he asked Banner how long he'd have to work for him, thought he'd like to move back to the Philadelphia area and get an outdoors job in construction or something, he didn't really like the desert. Banner blew up at him and said he was to stay until Banner decided he didn't need him anymore and if he took a hike he ought to keep in mind that Banner could have the charges revived anytime, the indictment was still valid and he was a friend of the judge. Chuck was a prisoner.

  He figured, well, he shouldn't piss and moan too much, he had been in possession and he had had intent, so his conviction was as sure as sunrise, and three-to-five in the desert wasn't half as nasty as three-to-five in “Q” or someplace.

  Then Banner began to lean on him for more than just driving, like getting some inside information from some of his old NFL buddies that Banner could pass on to his friends, and taking Banner to Tahoe and Reno and other places and dealing with a bunch of Eye-Ties in shiny suits about cleaning up after Banner and keeping it quiet, and, over the past few months, ferrying girls and shit—and sometimes just the shit itself, hidden in Pringle's potato-chip cans—up the hill to Xanadu.

  Even that he could deal with, could rationalize, because recovery is a one-man job, and no matter what Banner was doing to himself, he—Chuck—was keeping himself clean one day at a time, and that was all that counted. He tried to talk to Banner a couple of times, offered to help him, even be his private sponsor and get him clean again, and Banner just kissed him off like he was a worm. So Chuck figured. Fuck him. Every man for himself.

  Then came the Natasha business.

  She had heard talk about Banner, maybe she overheard one of Don Ciccio's parasites bragging at a prizefight or some showbiz stand-around, and she decided to pay him a visit. No warning, no nothing.

  First thing Chuck heard about it was when she called him at home and asked him to pick her up at the airport and drive her up to Xanadu.

  It was in the car that she told him she had heard bad n
ews, and she asked him if it was true.

  “I didn't say dick," Chuck said, "and I told her why I wasn't about to. She accepted that real nice. She was in fine shape, all pretty like in the pictures, in control. Said she was gonna lay it out for Stone, plain and simple: He cleaned up his act or she was gonna blow the whistle. She wanted him to go back into treatment, said she’ll even go with him if he wanted."

  Chuck stopped.

  "Then what?" Preston said.

  “Don't know. Don't know if I ever will. I parked the car and went 'round to the slaves' quarters to get Cook to make me a sandwich. 'Bout an hour later, I was there havin' coffee and a smoke. Stone came in and said he had to see me. He looked bad, all shaky and shitty.

  ''We get back in the main house and he says, Something's wrong with Natasha, she up and run away. He musta seen in my eyes that I had trouble swallowin' that, 'cause he started off on how he could tell the minute she walked in the door she was on somethin', she was all frazzled and didn't make sense. When I didn't chime in right away and agree with him, he said. Of course, it would've been hard for you to know because you were in the front of the limo and she was alone in the back and she never was a big talker to ... He couldn't bring himself to say what he meant—servants or the masses or something—so he let it tail off. I made a mistake and told him right then that she sat in the front seat, not the back, and she talked the whole way. If I had a brain in this fuckin' coconut of mine, I woulda saved that for the sheriff.

  “I wanted to go outside and have a look for her, and he told me not to bother, she had called a cab. Then he said. No, she had run out and said she was gonna call a cab. He didn't know what he was talkin' about. When I said I had to look for her, he brought up the indictment crap again. So I never did see the hole in the fence, not till . . . after.

  “Five o'clock the next day, the motherfuckin’ German whore of a flame-red car shows up outside my condo.”