“How much is it?”
“Two dollars every Saturday.”
“Wow. When I was a kid I only got a quarter!”
Hungrily, she sucked on his fingers. Joe said, “What do you mean you stipulate child support as alimony?” Might as well bone up for his own immediate future.
“He gets a tax break if it’s listed as alimony.” Reaching for the bedside ashtray, she snuffed her cigarette, then played with herself as he slowly pumped.
Bradley called, “Mom, are you still in there?”
“Of course I’m still in here.”
“It got awful quiet. What are you guys doing?”
“We’re trying to relax. Now let’s go, buster. Get dressed, get fed, and get going. And feed Bozo and Sasha too, before you leave.”
“I fed them yesterday.”
“They eat every day, just like you and me. Oh golly, Joe, keep on moving just like that, oh Jesus you’re good to me. Oh darling … hey! Don’t stop!”
“I have to or else I’ll come.”
“God forbid—not yet. This is too good. I want it to last forever.”
“Mom, we’re all out of dogfood.”
“No we’re not. I got a fifty-pound bag of Purina chow two days ago.”
“Well, it’s not under the sink beside the garbage can.”
“Of course not, stupid. I put it in that space between the washing machine and the dryer.”
“Jeez. Why didn’t you tell me in the first place?”
“Don’t go away!” she protested as Joe removed himself. “What are you doing?” Joe backed off the bed, dragging her half off with him. Her torso on the bed, her feet on the floor, he kneeled and tongued her again. Nancy gave a stifled, happy little gasp: the living-room telephone clattered. Bradley said “Just a minute,” and returned to their door.
“Mom! Telephone!”
“Who is it?”
“I don’t know. It’s for Mr. Miniver. It’s a girl.”
Joe stood up and leaned over, grabbing both her forearms. “Tell her to call back later,” Nancy said.
“I can’t. She said it’s very important.”
“Who the hell is it?” Joe blurted, almost crippled by déjà vu.
“Mom, what’s the matter with him?” the sadistic cherub asked with malevolent apprehension. “His voice sounds funny.”
“Bradley, please darling, just go hang up the telephone. Then feed the animals and eat yourself.”
“How can I eat myself?”
“You know what I meant. Are you dressed yet? You’ve only got eight more minutes.”
“I’m almost dressed.”
“What are you wearing?”
“My jodhpurs and my John Travolta sneakers and those socks that Daddy sent.”
Nancy whispered, “Oh God!” as Joe made a new move. Out loud, she said, “How many times have I told you you can’t wear those jodhpurs to school? They’re old and moth-eaten. They look ridiculous.”
“But I don’t have anything else that’s clean.”
In the process of swinging Nancy off the bed to drape her over a footstool, Joe bumped against the bedside table, knocking a lamp onto the floor.
Bradley cried, “Mom, what was that?”
“I just tipped over the lamp reaching for my cigarettes, darling. Now come on, right away, put on another pair of pants and get out of here.”
Oh she looked beautiful, spread-eagled above the thick, cobalt-blue rug. Joe straddled her in the leapfrog position, shoving it all the way past China into a Pakistani cornfield. “Oh wow are you ever doing me,” she tremoloed.
Crash! went something in the kitchen—something loud, heavy, splintery. An awful silence ensued. Joe quit moving: they both held their breath.
“Bradley?”
“What?” His voice came from right on the other side of the door. The little bugger had crept up on them.
“What was that god-awful noise?”
“Sasha made one of your plants fall.”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m hungry! I’m gonna starve to death.”
Prodded by Joe, Nancy slithered off the stool, landing faceup on the rug. Joe sat on her stomach, paddling breasts, stroking her throat and lips. Then he let some drool fall between her breasts, smeared it around with his finger, reached for a pillow to boost her head, and whispered, “Press your tits together.” She did. Fitting his penis into the slick groove between her exaggerated globes, he fucked that sexy crease.
“I don’t care if you starve to death,” Nancy said. Her eyes, as if facing a firing squad, were wide, her lips pursed as if to whistle.
Bradley whacked the door a dozen times, shouted “I hate you!,” and stomped indignantly off.
In the background, Bozo commenced barking and snarling. Burglars? Porcupines? Joe touched the head of his cock against her lips, loomed above her for a beat, then lowered into her mouth until she gagged. He raised back, dangling above her lips. The orgasm began its swell from a thousand miles away, taking as long to reach its staging area as David Lean’s galloping desert horseman had taken to reach the camera in Lawrence of Arabia.
In agony, Joe thought, Maybe I can talk it out. Aloud, as he touched his prick to the fat part of her lower lip, he said, “I’m almost there … you’re such a sexy lay … oh Jesus I … I—” But Nancy had heard the school bus rattle onto the subdivision drive: “Bradley?”
Came a surly growl from the living room: “What?”
“Here’s the school bus!”
The front door opened, and Bradley shot back a final, defiant “I hate you!” as Joe tried to will at least the advance troops of sperm onto her lips. He could picture it, but failed to make it happen. In his mind the residue bubbled out and he guided his penis in a slow circle, laying jism—as if it were toothpaste—on her beautiful lips.
But only in his head.
Her alarm buzzed an hour late—there must have been an early morning blackout. It was time to rise and shine.
“I don’t care,” Nancy murmured sleepily. “I think you’re sensational. What a stud.”
When was the last time someone had called him that?
* * *
AN HOUR LATER, when—as if ripped from too many lotus blossoms—he staggered in to the bathroom, Joe half expected to see Paul Newman or Marlon Brando reflected back at him from the medicine-cabinet mirror. Instead, what was this?—the same old Joe Miniver, and still up to his eyeballs in trouble. Marital trouble, financial trouble, scam trouble. It looked like curtains with Heidi and the kids; and now that he actually had the cocaine (though not his patron saint druggie, Peter Roth) in his hot little hands, how was he supposed to cut and distribute the white gold?
Apparently, judging from the evidence so far accumulated, he was determined to excavate the biggest grave yet seen in these here parts. Depression clobbered him. Weak-kneed, he plopped onto the toilet. Like, how, overnight, could he have abdicated every moral imperative giving his sloppy, yes, but also loyal and eminently ethical, life meaning?
Once it started, where would it end—in a John Berryman Icarus act? In Fitzgeraldian delirium tremens? In Hemingwayesque shotgun blasts? Or in some scathingly devious Sylvia Plathology?
When, clad only in pink bikini briefs, she ambled past the bathroom doorway, the woman who had turned him on only a heartbeat ago, appeared slump-shouldered, potbellied, flabby-assed, and pigeon-toed, the epitome of suburban housewifehood, and about as alluring as a potato.
Joe washed, scrubbed his ivories using her toothbrush, shared a cup of coffee, helped resuscitate the smashed plant, snarled at Sasha (who gestured obscenely in return), and made three false exits, returning for his glasses, his wallet, and the carton carrying $100,000 worth of cocaine. But then, finally, he ran.
Six years had gone by in the last forty-eight hours!
* * *
HEAD DOWN, instinctively slaloming through joggers as he verbalized yet another letter to Heidi—“Did you think you were being clever wh
en you called this morning, is that what you thought?”—Joe almost knocked down Ralph Kapansky. Veering, he braked and would have crashed had Ralph not grabbed the handlebars. Rimpoche danced clumsily around the bike, yapping befuddledly.
“Is it true?” Ralph asked.
“Is what true?”
“Have you left Heidi? Are you getting a divorce? Are you going to marry Nancy Ryan?”
“That’s what I like about this town, Ralph. Scott Harrison drops a banana in Safeway, and Diana Clayman picks it up and hands it back to him. One hour later, in the Prince of Whales Café, Tribby Gordon tells Darlene Johnson that he heard Diana flogged Scott’s log in front of the Kitty Litter, they were both busted, arraigned, and jailed, and, while in the local hoosegow, Diana hung herself with her own panty hose.”
“Hey, man, aren’t you overdoing it a little?”
“I’m sick of the rumor mill, Ralph! I’m sick of the lack of privacy! I’m sick of living in a nouveau-hippie town where hordes of filthy-rich, college-educated welfare cases playing poverty fooseball blunder scurrilously around the valley spreading doom and gloom like a bunch of banana-republic, machine-gun-toting, Fort Benning–trained sadists!”
“Speaking of gun-toting, old sport—what the hell happened at the bus depot last night? I’m surprised to see you alive. Somebody told me you were practically vivisected with hot lead around midnight.”
“That’s a semiaccurate description.”
“Apparently they got the suitcase.”
“How’d you know about the suitcase?”
“Rachel Parquielli was talking to Suki Terrell, who mentioned it.”
“Where did she hear about it?”
“I’m not sure. But I think Diana Clayman spilled the beans.”
“And she found out how?”
“From Angel Guts, who else?”
“I didn’t tell Angel Guts.”
“I know, I know. But he found out somehow.”
“Well, for what it’s worth, our scam is still alive,” Joe said nervously. “Last night Sasha leaped into the fray and nabbed the one box that held the cocaine.”
“Who’s Sasha?”
“Nancy’s monkey.”
“Where’s the dope?”
“Right there.” Joe nodded at the tea carton in his basket.
Aghast, Ralph said, “You’re just carting it around, out in the wide open, like that?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Well, shit, man, suppose somebody knew? You’re a sitting duck.”
“How could they know? Everybody who’s interested must think everybody else but me has it.”
“So what are we supposed to do now?”
“First I go to the café and catch my breath.”
“We’ll have to meet again.”
“Not in Tribby’s plane!”
“But we have to cut the stuff and unload it fast,” Ralph said. “Can I take a peek?”
“No, dummy—sheesh!”
“Okay. But what’s the plan?”
“I haven’t the faintest. Peter was the key, and he blew it. So right now the logistics are up for grabs. But I’ll figure out something and be in touch.”
“You should be wearing a bulletproof vest!” Ralph called out cheerfully as Joe pedaled on, slumped morosely over his handlebars like a country mortician suffering from a spinal fusion on his way to claim a rural corpse.
Two joggers wearing large earmuff-shaped transistor radios listened to rock music from KKCV or KWIK as they cantered along. The earmuffs enraged Joe. He wanted to stop, knock down the joggers, and tear the offensive gadgets off their lame brains while berating them soundly:
“I used to run cross-country in college! I looked at the trees! I smelled all the smells of nature! I listened to the birds singing! What the hell is the matter with you zombies?”
Face frozen in a clandestine snarl, Nick Danger scuttled across the road, clutching his mysterious suitcase and muttering angrily to himself.
* * *
THE PRINCE OF WHALES creaked at the seams from a ragtag gathering of colorful expatriates. Tea box safely tucked under one arm, Joe chose a table occupied by Tribby Gordon, Diana Clayman, Mimi McAllister, and Jeff Orbison. While he was at the cash register buying a newspaper, Ralph and Rimpoche jogged in and flopped down at the same table. Joe returned, unfolded his blat, and, mimicking buffoonish surprise, said, “My oh my, they’re still fighting in Beirut.”
Tribby said, “What’s this I hear about you and Heidi?”
“I give up—what did you hear about me and Heidi?”
Ralph stroked his beard. “In front of all these wonderful people, Tribby, we wouldn’t want to be indiscreet.”
Tribby said, “What’s the secret? Channel eight had a roving reporter over in the PK Subdivision Number Four last night, and on the eleven P.M. newsbreak the whole valley got a four-minute shot of Joe and a-certain-somebody-not-his-wife-who-shall-remain-nameless engaged in some very funky anatomical hijinks.”
From then on it was all downhill. Joe ordered one egg, toast, a glass of orange juice, and Sanka. Taken aback by his sulky manner, Darlene said, “Don’t you mean you’d like one cyclops, OE, slice of toasted wheat, side order of squeal—that’s double links not patties—and a glass of Florida sunshine?”
But Joe was in no mood for it. “Hey, just bring the food, Darlene, and cut the palaver, I got a headache.”
“Male chauvinist pigs,” Mimi huffed scornfully. “Every time you turn over a rock in this valley some liberated house-husband’s skeleton jumps up and bites your nose.”
While Joe tried to read, they talked. At first, Mimi carried the ball. A health nut, and a reflexologist who carted wooden barrels to clients’ houses and manipulated their tootsies for a double sawbuck, she lived in a La Ciénega tipi and was blind as a bat. She refused to wear glasses, however, figuring them to be debilitating eye-crutches. “Without glasses, I can force my eyes to get better.” Because Mimi was on the fifth day of a water fast, they discussed the pros and cons of that.
Water fasts, Hanumans, reflexology—Joe rarely participated in such erudite discussions, being basically a meat-and-potatoes man.
Ralph soon began extolling the virtues of colonic enemas. Jeff Orbison claimed the healthiest way to crap was squatting—and that’s the way he defecated, even on a toilet. Next, vegetarian diets used up ten or fifteen minutes. Mimi said many vegetarians blew their scene completely by overloading on carbohydrates. Diana Clayman postulated that everybody was freaking out because their air had become overloaded with negative ions. Tribby informed them that on his morning KWIK astrology program, Pancho Nordica had predicted money for Leos, love for Aquarians, and heartbreak for Pisces. He had also urged his listeners to eat more bran and Top Ramen, and “cut out the Jujyfruits.”
Tiring of gastrointestinal themes, they ran down the Morning Disaster Report, a regular feature of the Prince of Whales, and tuned into religiously by the 4,837 people in this town (sarcasmed Joe Miniver while pretending to fanatically devour his newspaper) who were writing novels. Norman Mailer never said it, but he might have had he visited the place: “Just give me ten minutes in the Prince of Whales Café, and I could write a two-thousand-page novel about Chamisaville.”
What else was new? Drunk for the eleventh time in as many days, Cobey Dallas had gone on a rampage last night. It ended when he tried to smash his Volkswagen Beetle into the La Tortuga, where, apparently, Suki Terrell (with whom Cobey had had an affair) was sharing a number two combination plate with the EAT ME drummer, Tom Yard.
Terry and Perry Kahn were in trouble also. Terry resembled a great many newly arrived Chamisaville women Joe knew. Three times weekly she had dance classes at the Chamisaville Art Association auditorium. She acted in two plays every year and taught part-time at the Shanti Institute, where all three Kahn kids were educationally interred. In winter she took her offspring skiing, and raced in the Nastar events herself. She was blond and blue-eyed, tense, and very competitive.
They were charter members of Tennis Heaven and spent six hundred dollars a summer on memberships and lessons alone. All the children took piano lessons. But Perry was straying way off course. Three years ago he had been a handsome young developer, fresh out of Miami real estate and construction. Then he started smoking dope and playing the guitar. After cleaning up on his first half-dozen subdivisions, he seemed to lose interest. His hair grew long, he adopted a colorful headband. When he and Joe occasionally met, Perry babbled about psychic energy and psychedelics. Rumor had it he was into some heavy shit—LSD, mescaline, maybe mushrooms. Perry this past year had grown filthy, gentle, absentminded, and abstract, as Terry panicked. “You know what?” Perry had told Joe one day. “I’m really losing interest in making money.” Last week he had run off to a Colorado ashram where he hoped to learn the art of psychic healing. And Terry was at the end of her rope. Yesterday she had complained to Mimi McAllister: “If that man becomes a hippie do-gooder, I think I’ll commit suicide!”
Pearly Stan, a man with a silver eye patch who had leased the La Lomita Dance Hall from Wilkerson Busbee, had jumped town last night, taking all the money and leaving his employees in the lurch, some to the tune of a thousand dollars. According to what Cobey Dallas had told Tribby (when Tribby bailed out Cobey early that morning), just before he split, Stan had offered to sell County Sheriff Eddie Semmelweis information on all the local dope dealers and buyers, but Eddie had refused, the county sheriff’s LEAA stocked coffers being semi-low after some untoward embezzlement. Eddie also told Cobey that Nikita Smatterling had tearfully staggered into the station last night to report that his elder kids, Sanji and Tofu, were getting ripped on Moroccan kif every day, and making daredevil junkets out underneath the girders of the Gorge Bridge, where passing motorists could hear them singing the best of The Who while dangling a thousand feet above oblivion. As an afterthought, Nikita admitted to Eddie that he had just poked a pistol into Ephraim Bonatelli’s stomach and pulled the trigger. Ephraim, apparently, had entered the Cinema Bar around closing time last night, wearing a gorilla mask and waving a pistol, and had threatened to kidnap (and sink his sexual meathooks into) Nikita’s youngest child, beautiful, seven-year-old Siddhartha, the blessed progeny of a brief union between Nikita and a hippie woman, originally from Scarsdale, named Rachel (Wisebaum) Whitefeather. She had spent time up at Davishi right after that eclectic Sufi commune was founded by Nikita and some of his friends during their off-hours from Pueblo construction jobs.