Minus a headlight apiece, the van and the microbus tore free of each other. The van’s rear end smacked into the Miracle Auto Supply display window, setting off a burglar alarm. The microbus had a flat rear tire, but lurched onto the highway going sixty, sparks whizzing off the rim. The van swerved away in the opposite direction, its denizens imparting a few lead epilogues toward the VW crew.
Silence, but for the burglar alarm, dropped like a curtain upon a bad show; and only Joe remained to tell the tale. Seated dumbfoundedly in a glittering puddle of shattered glass and spent cartridge shells, he was unnicked despite the fire fight that had raged around him for those rabid moments. Obviously, he had lost the contents of Peter’s suitcase, hence also his life savings, Eloy’s land, and the hope of a serene and productive future.
Matter-of-factly, Nancy said, “Are you all right?”
“I think so,” Joe gasped. “But I still can’t breathe. Are you okay?”
“Of course. Now come on. We’d better leave.”
“I don’t know if I can walk.”
“Try.”
Joe raised himself gingerly, expecting to discover blood spurting from a hole in his thigh, to feel his steaming guts bulge from a gaping gutwound. But nothing leaked or protruded from his trembling body. Apparently, all his organs were performing their crucial functions inside his body’s fragile sheath. A miracle? Or just dumb luck. Incredulously, Joe said, “I’m not even scratched.…”
Joe faced Nancy’s Beetle, his jaw dropped open. “Oh my God—!” Her car had not suffered even a minute blemish. And inside it sat Nancy in her sexy bathrobe, lipstick glistening, absolutely unruffled, like one of those magic-show ladies in a large basket through which dozens of harmless sabers had been thrust.
“Look at your car…” Joe stammered. “How in the name of Christ did it avoid being hit…?”
“Hop in, please. You look awful.”
Dizzily, Joe wrenched open the door. Crouched on the passenger seat, Sasha clutched the tea box to his chest.
“Sasha, sweetie, Mr. Miniver wants to sit down.”
The monkey leered and plucked a booger from his nose. Grasping his tail in one tiny, scaly pink hand, he poked the tip of the tail up a nostril, swabbing around.
“Sasha, darling…”
Bounding fluidly, Sasha leapt into the back seat, still clutching the tea box.
Joe collapsed. Nancy turned the ignition key, and the engine started up without a whimper.
She said, “I wonder what that was all about?”
Dully, Joe moaned, “It’s gone.”
“What is?”
“Everything. My past, my present, even my future.”
“Explain.”
“They got it all.”
“All what?”
“The dope in that suitcase. I just blew twelve thousand dollars.”
“Joe, what are you talking about?”
“You honestly don’t know?”
She nodded.
“Then you’re the only person in town who doesn’t.”
“Doesn’t know what?”
“One of those tea boxes held pure cocaine. That’s how I hoped to buy Eloy’s place.” Joe buried his face in his hands. “I don’t believe these past twenty-four hours!”
“Sasha picked up a box.”
“Big deal. One out of thirty. Some odds.”
“You never know. With just a little faith—”
“Do me a favor with your ‘faith,’ would you?”
“At least we could check.”
“You check. I’m sick.”
“Miracles can happen. All they take is a smidgen of belief.”
“Sorry, pal, I’m plumb out of smidgens.”
“Sasha,” Nancy coaxed, “give me that box.”
The monkey chattered busily, ignoring her command. He plucked at the box, forcing open an end tab. Turning completely, Nancy reached in back, and, soothing him—“There, there, that’s a good little boy”—she wrested the carton from his arms.
Joe grumbled, “I’m gonna commit suicide. Actually, I might not have to. I’m being smothered by an invisible pillow. I want my asthma medicine!”
“First we’ll check out this carton. It feels almost too heavy for tea.”
“Oh sure. In the middle of a crazy gun battle the world’s nastiest monkey grabs a box at random, and voilà!—a hundred Gs worth of cocaine.”
“I wouldn’t be at all surprised.” Nancy pried open the end flaps.
“I would.” Joe wallowed in melancholic self-pity. “The way my luck’s been running, not only will it not be full of cocaine, but there’ll be something horrible inside: a Gila monster, or a black-widow spider. It’ll bite me, I’ll drop into a month-long coma, and accumulate twenty-eight thousand in medical bills.…”
“I doubt God would have let Sasha risk his life just for a box of tea.” Nancy pried up another flap.
“If that’s the one with the coke,” Joe joked leadenly, “I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.”
“Well, here we go.” Nancy opened the box and peered inside.
Sarcastically, Joe said, “And it’s full of uncut cocaine, right?”
“I don’t know. Does cocaine look like talcum powder?”
“Oh my God!” Joe sobbed giddily. “It couldn’t have happened, but it did!”
* * *
MOMENTS LATER, within sight of the Castle of Golden Fools, Joe realized abruptly that going after his Aminodur and the Alupent could be like trying to crack the Los Angeles Bank of America’s Mosler vault without setting off enough alarms to bring the entire LAPD down on his head. If they parked on the road, and he tried to tiptoe into the yard and pinch his pills from the Green Gorilla, it was a million to one against pulling off the feat without triggering at least one dog, such as Rimpoche, who’d alert Tribby’s three dogs, who’d alert all the people.
Quick decisions were needed, however. Another five minutes of reduced oxygen and his brain would sink into a permanent vegetal state anyway. So—what the hell? Since a racket was inevitable, he might as well be bold, Cast Temerity to the Wind, Seize the Day … Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom.
I.e.: Rush the joint, set off all the alarms, grab the prime minister, machine-gun his bodyguards, and split with the goodies before anybody could make a positive identification.
Joe said, “Drive in as fast as you can, stop by that green truck, see? I’ll jump out and grab the stuff, leap back into the car, and you take off. It’ll sound like the Titicut Follies—Rimpoche will go berserk—but pay no attention. The thing to do is do it so fast that we’re long gone by the time anybody human can get their act together to stumble to a window and see what’s up. Okay?”
The princess of Everything’s-Gonna-Be-AII-Right smiled serenely. “Okeydokey.”
“Bueno. Turn off the lights. Now: on your mark … get set … go!”
Nancy peeled in, crossed the parking area, stomped on the brakes. Joe yanked a handle and slammed his shoulder against the door to pop it open. But he had locked it. The handle came off in his hand. And the door did not budge, not even by a hair. Excruciatingly pained, he shrieked, “Get out, I gotta exit on your side!” He shoved her onto the ground and, for good measure, trompled over her, scrambling to clear the Beetle. Enraged by his own stupidity, he gallop-limped for the truck, opened the door, dived into the glove compartment … and couldn’t find the pills. Completely freaked, he threw papers, envelopes, maps, wrenches, screwdrivers, washers, inkless ballpoints, and fuses onto the floor, frantically searching for his pills—but no dice. Crying “Oh no!” he slammed the door and sprinted to the VW bus. Both the passengerside lock and the U-piece apparatus on the rear sliding door were broken, meaning the only sure way to enter was through the driverside access. But it was locked. “Jesus H. Fucking Christ!” Joe poked in the sliding door’s vent window, reached down and flicked up the lock knob, grasped the outside handle, jamming it forward, and the contraption opened. Lurching backward, however, it also caved outward,
knocking Joe down: he’d forgotten the iron U-piece attaching it to the outside runner was broken.
“You all right?” Ralph called. He was lying supine in his float-tank casket with the hatch open, reading a Playboy by a little night-light he had rigged up in there, while listening to a Neil Diamond record on a waterproof stereo speaker extension from the modular componented sound-shaped rig in his tipi.
Joe ignored him. Huffing now, half fainting from the asthmatic trauma induced by his bizarre exertions, he clambered into the car, leaned over the passenger seat, and rifled through the glove compartment, locating—hallelujah!—a plastic jar of Aminodur and Breathine. Three seconds later he was back at the Bug, lunging over Nancy to reach the passenger seat as he choked out fevered orders: “Let’s go! Hit that road!”
Accelerating at a casual rate, she steered left, onto the paved road, and braked.
Joe babbled, “What are you doing?”
Her window was rolled down. “Listen.”
“Huh?” Terrified by her strange behavior, he actually listened.
No quieter yard had ever existed. Lights remained extinguished in the Castle. Rimpoche was asleep somewhere, oblivious to the commotion. Benevolently, the moon—a wise old Santa Claus—smiled on the valley: Accept this gift of my light, all you wee mortals; sleep like puppies for a change. Countless stars, friendly nocturnal dimples, twinkled.
“See? You got all bent out of shape for nothing.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s all in how you feel. And in the kind of energy you project.”
For his next trick, he would perform a pas de deux with the childproof cover of his pill bottle. It crackled and twisted, but held fast. Nancy flicked on the headlights and they cruised off at a reasonable speed. Joe pressed his palm down hard, but the bottle remained impregnable. He banged the cover against the dashboard. No luck. Lodging the bottle between his thighs for leverage worked even worse.
“Have you got a hammer, a pair of pliers, a wrench, anything in this car?”
Negative: “The last time I had a flat tire was in 1972, and so—”
“Don’t say it, please.”
“Don’t say what?”
“Don’t say ‘If you don’t project a breakdown, you won’t have one.’ I’ve had enough of that drivel.” Stertorous was an adjective accurately describing his gasping. He couldn’t breathe. His chin and sternum itched, his inner chest felt as if it had been sandpapered by shredded gunmetal. Not for many a moon had he uncorked a lalapalooza like this baby!
“Stop the car, Nancy.”
Joe tumbled to the pavement. He circled in front of the Bug, located a rock in the headlight glare, set his pill bottle on the macadam, and smashed it with a single heavy blow. Gathering up the pills, he popped one, funneled the rest into a shirt pocket, and, tearfully sobbing “This can’t be happening to me!,” he struggled to regain both the Beetle and his sanity. Once safely inside, both weeping and giggling, he cackled, “Carry on, Jeeves.…”
And they headed back for the barn, thus ending the first day in the Bachelor Bacchanalia and Liberated Life of Joe Miniver, Boy Klutz, All-Around Shlemiel of this Floundering Decade.
But he had that cocaine!
3
MONDAY
To know how to take women
Brings good fortune.
Sleep had not exactly tackled the entire unraveled sleeve of his spiritual woe, but it had applied darning needles to the more obvious gaps in that fabled garment.
Opening his eyes, Joe felt better. No matter that his head ached, his thighs twitched from cramps, one testicle had piercing shooting pains, and his heart was broken—if he could breathe, he was happy. Short of expiring in a violent plane crash, death by suffocation ruled the top notch in Joe’s list of the Most Excruciating Offs populating the Grim Reaper’s ugly repertoire. He’d sooner commit suicide by hammering a screwdriver into his ear.
All his life Joe had awakened with a hard-on so stiff it seemed reinforced by molybdenum, and this morning was no exception. He opened one eye upon a room fused with amaranthine premature morning sunlight that reflected heroically on his petrified peter. A right-hand probe discovered another warm body beside his thigh. Joe’s theory had always been that an erection wasted was an erection to be mourned, and so, marveling at the lust inspired by this passive floozy engineering his vertiginous downfall, he swung lazily atop the lady and kissed open her eyes. Nancy murmured, “Um, nice lips.” Seconds later, she gave a soft gasp. Her cheeks tantalizingly rosy from sleep, she said, “You know, for a nonspiritual person, you’re a pretty good lover.”
“‘Pretty’ good?”
Taking his head in both hands, she lowered him to her lips, planting a coo-shaped buss against the tip of his nose. On cue, Bradley banged the door Joe had providentially insisted they lock last night.
“Mom, I’m hungry!”
“There’s some Cocoa Puffs in the cabinet beside the refrigerator.”
Joe made a horrible face: “You feed him that kind of shit?”
“He adores them.”
“According to the last government survey you get minus four hundred seventeen vitamins in every box.” He rotated calmly inside her. “They cause breast cancer in laboratory rats, and kwashiorkor in chimpanzees.”
“What’s kwashiorkor?”
“The Biafran starvation disease. Apparently the only thing worse than Cocoa Puffs is agent orange, that chemical we used to defoliate Vietnam.” Such fun it was to twiddle her nipples between thumbs and forefingers; Joe ogled the snowy cascade of smooth curves that characterized her breasts.
“I don’t want Cocoa Puffs for breakfast, Mom. I want Jimmy Dean sausage and a fried egg and some hot chocolate in my Ronald McDonald mug.”
“You know we don’t have Jimmy Dean sausage, we happen to be vegetarians.” She gave Joe a good-humored wink. “Every morning he asks for Jimmy Dean sausage.”
Reaching blindly onto the bedside table, she located a matchbook and her cigarettes and lit one.
“Well, what am I supposed to eat?” Bradley pounded his little fist emphatically against the door, as Joe raised her legs, placing them over his shoulders.
“Make yourself a Morningstar Farm sausage. They’re delicious.”
“I hate that rubber meat. It tastes like sawdust!” The little creep emphasized his anger with another blam against the doorway of their fuckatorium. Nancy blew smoke up into Joe’s face. Gripping both her biceps and grinning one of his more dervish grins, he laid into her for a bit like a Manhattan air drill, wondering: Could he shake her composure?
“What time is it, Joe?”
He checked the clock-radio: “Almost seven-twenty.”
“Oh God! Bradley, are you dressed?”
“I don’t have any clothes to wear. All my stuff is in the laundry.”
“Go to the bathroom hamper, find something semiclean, and put it on. It’s seven-twenty and you’ve only got fifteen minutes until the bus comes.”
Joe held her legs in a high and wide V, digging the dark pubic tangle where his penis was lodged. Her thighs were a little flaccid; he liked her voluptuous belly. Uninserting himself, he dropped his head between her thighs, inhaling as much fur and oily tendrils as he could, nibbling, munching, sucking, gumming, and drilling all over with his tongue. Arching, she placed her non-cigarette-occupied hand against his head, and uttered appropriate, if whispered, sounds.
“I don’t want to wear something from the hamper, Mom. Every morning I have to wear something from the hamper. I never get to wear any clean clothes. All the kids tease me.”
“Oh Joe, oh my God, oh you bastard … Bradley, go find the clothes, go make a breakfast, and go to school!”
“I wanna come in. Why did you lock the door? What are you doing?”
“I have a right to privacy, darling. Now come on—you’ve only got, uh … twelve minutes.”
“Is Mr. Miniver still in there with you?”
“Yes. Now listen—p
lease. Mommy’s tired. And you’re big enough to get ready for school without my help.”
“Is Mr. Miniver asleep? What’s he doing?”
Mr. Miniver was flipping his mom onto her stomach and entering her from behind, thinking that if God hadn’t invented female buttocks and the doggy position, Mr. Miniver himself would have spent the better part of his life in the pursuit of realizing that invention. Or he would have died trying.
“He’s just lying here, fast asleep. Now come on, Bradley, get cracking. If you miss the school bus I won’t drive you there, you’ll have to walk.”
“If I miss the school bus I won’t go!” Once more, he whacked the door for emphasis. Still working on the cigarette, Nancy exhaled smoke languidly while backing her butt up against Joe and almost triggering an orgasm.
“Don’t move!” Joe said urgently. Cautiously, he stretched back his legs, lowered on top of her, and scooped his hands around to cup her breasts.
“If you don’t do as I say, right now,” Nancy threatened amiably, “you won’t get any allowance on Saturday.” Millimeter by slippery millimeter, Joe sank himself to the hilt. “That’s it,” Nancy whispered lasciviously. “Shove it all the way to China!”
Twice, the little Nazi out there kicked against the door. “If you don’t give me my allowance, Mom, I’ll call Daddy and tell him to call the judge and the judge will put you in jail.”
“What’s he talking about?” Joe’s right hand prowled around in her groin, then he raised the hand to her mouth, painting her lips with her own juices.
“In the divorce agreement he made me stipulate that a certain amount of his child support, which we list as alimony, has to go directly to Bradley in the form of an allowance.”