HOUSE OF JAGUAR

by Mike Bond

  “Fuck you, Mitch,” Angelica said.

  38

  HE CLIMBED the stairs to the third floor, went into Eric’s room, the purple glow of a fluid oscillator sliding round the walls, a fish mobile banging his head as he leaned over the racing car waterbed. “How you doin’, amigo?”

  “Murph! Where’ve you been?”

  “Traveling. Had to stay a while.”

  The boy sat up. “You get hurt or something?”

  “Nothing bad. How’s you?”

  “Doin’ fine.”

  “Feelin’ alone?”

  “Never.”

  “Everybody does, some of the time.”

  Eric glanced at the door. “You don’t act so lonely, Murph.”

  “It’s a mask, amigo. A charade.”

  “What’s that?”

  “When people dress up to be somebody they’re not.” He brushed the boy’s pale hair, short and crisp. “Pretend they’re happy when they’re not.”

  “Mom’s happy when she drinks.”

  “Yeah, I know about that.”

  “What’s drinking change?”

  “Makes everything worse.”

  “Mom says my dad was a lush. I asked Mary what that means and she said a drunk.”

  “I never knew your dad. But he made beautiful music. Music to make people happy.”

  “Like drinking does?”

  “No. Not like that.”

  The boy snuggled down. “I was worried about you, Murph.”

  “No need to.”

  “Mom isn’t going to stay with you, is she?”

  He patted the boy’s arm, shook his head.

  “She never stays with anybody, does she?”

  “You and I can still be friends.”

  “You’re awful thin, Murph. You wreck your bike again? You sure you’re OK?”

  “Guaranteed. You get some sleep now. And Eric −”

  “Yeah, Murph?”

  “If I don’t come around for a while, that don’t mean I’m not missing you... I’ll be back, soon’s I can.”

  The boy had drifted off to sleep and Murphy went downstairs. The living room was crowded, more people on the stairs going down to the sunken parlor, Guns ‘n Roses thudding pyrotechnic solos off the walls. To be able to do that, Murphy thought, what the needle gives, pure perception of beauty, untainted? He thought of Sherrie Cunningham, the blue-black marks on the inside of her elbow, of Lila the junkie who’d gone straight then jumped off the Golden Gate.

  “Murph!” someone called. “Bring your axe?”

  “’Lo, Tiny.” He leaned into the man’s face to speak over the music. “Not going to compete with this dude.”

  “He is amazing.” Tiny gulped a glass of red. “Listen to that shit, how he fills it in, doubles up on the E.”

  “It’s not that, Tiny. It’s that he’s so clean.”

  “Like Clapton.”

  “Different. A different vision.”

  “Heard you had some trouble,” a woman bent forward to be kissed. “Down in Costa Rica?”

  “Hi, Laura.” Her lips tasted like cold cream and raspberries. She shoved against him and he clung a second, nipping her, pulled away. “Where’d you hear that?”

  “Paper.”

  “It was Guatemala. All over now.”

  A girl came by with a silver salver with lines on it and a silver tube and Laura put down her wine to take one, her face sharp then melting into a smile as the coke hit her.

  I’m on the night train,

  ready to crash and burn

  The girl offered Murphy the tray; he shook his head. “Oh what the hell,” he said, sucking in one line, switching sides, then the next. It was a cold blue blade of perception: he could see individual lamé filigrees on the girl’s neckline, her big soft tits beneath, nipples poking out the fabric that clung all the way down to her mound and slender thighs, could hear the drummer’s quick ripple tossed in for free and the guitarist’s fingertips quicksilver down the neck, in and out of blues, playing for God, to God only, he could taste the wine and the rooty soil and chromium sulfate in it, taste Laura’s lipstick on his lips and the lilac perfume of this girl with the silver salver, see every black and silver curly hair of Tiny’s beard, smell Tiny’s breath of garlic and weed, his armpit stench and the Ban under the girl’s shaved pits. Someone knocked over a plant on the glass table by the piano and he saw it fall in slow motion, the awkward frightened leaves, the dirt rushing out when the pot hit the floor, stems snapping like soft wet bones. “Shit!” someone said, stepping back into the dirt, the stems squelching. Someone hit two piano notes, an F and G, discordant, making him look up, but it was just a wine glass, sitting on the keys.

  A rocket took his brain straight up, his body far below on the launch pad but still he could feel every cell and the fire climbing from his legs and roaring into his sex and soaring up his chest where every breath was made of ice. He met the girl with the silver salver in the dining room and she gave him two more hits and he held the salver out to her and she did also, and we’re completely in touch, he thought, her body absolutely part of his so when he rubbed her breast he could feel not only its soft smooth heaviness but also how the tingle from his hand made her breast feel hot inside, the nipple’s stinging need to be touched, touched softly, fingered, could feel the ache racing down into her guts and through her groin to him, her teeth sharp into his lips, her hand around him moving back and forth, and as they went upstairs he raised her dress so he could see her long thighs rising before him, bending at the knee, her crotch in white lacy underpants and he put his hand there as she climbed the stairs, feeling the wet hairs through the silk and wondered is she that hot already or is it from someone else? In Angelica’s room he held her against the shut door and shoved her underpants down, her spine against the jamb and her legs around him; he gripped her thighs and shoved into her, her arms squeezing his neck and her teeth hard against his cheek till she came sobbing, leaning back her head, red mouth open, wide large teeth agape with a thread of shiny saliva between them. He carried her to the bed and pushed her legs up around his neck to go in deeper, feeling her every cell, his own, every molecule he breathed.

  “I’ve got to go back,” she said. She went holding up her dress into the bathroom and squatted on the toilet. “Barney asked me, keep everybody stoned.”

  “I could fuck you all night.”

  “I gotta go back.” She wiped herself, holding her thighs apart and looking at the toilet paper. “Barney said he’ll get me a part.”

  He followed her down, sex on fire. “I don’t care if he had Scuds,” a woman was saying. “That’s no reason to nuke him.”

  “We’re not getting single time,” another said.

  No money in our jackets

  and our jeans are torn

  your hands are cold

  but your lips are warm

  He went into an atrium of lime and jasmine trees enclosed by a silvery cedar wall overhung with purple wisteria. There was a pool with a rock fountain, a lone dwarf maple stooping over it, red carp in the water. I’m just like them, he thought.

  “Lovely tonight.”

  He looked at the voice. A slim man with spiky hair, an earring and black leather jacket. I’m supposed to know your name.

  “You’ve been out of town, Murph?”

  “Few weeks.”

  “Must be nice to travel. Like that.”

  “You should try it.” He went back inside and met Laura in the hall and she kissed him hard, pushing her pelvis against him, but would not go upstairs. “Sleeping with skulls,” he said.

  A guy in black jeans and cowboy boots took her arm. “How’s your horses?” Murphy asked him.

  “You got the wrong guy,” the man smiled patronizingly. “I don’t have any horses.”

  “Then what you doing in those boots?”

  He was talking with a smaller girl in jeans, sandals with little red-painted t
oes, her blouse open down the middle. She gave him two capsules of Ecstasy. “The more I reach, the further things recede,” she said.

  “Don’t reach. And everything’ll come to you.”

  She laughed. “Don’t be nasty.”

  You’re no good

  you’re no good

  you’re no good

  baby you’re no good

  He reached out to the girl’s lovely breasts inside the open blouse but she batted his hand away and walked back into the living room.

  Downstairs was an enclosed terrace and a redwood tub full of people, and others sitting on the sides with their feet in it. The water burnt his skin; he sat with his back against a nozzle pumping hot vibrating water. There was a noise in his head like a jet landing but it never landed, just kept getting deeper and louder. The people beside him were fucking and trying not to show it, till the girl came and wilted on the man, her long hair down over his shoulder into the frothing steamy water. When she moved up and away from the man Murphy slipped up to her from behind and she was angry for a moment then widened her legs and let him come inside and began to move up and down while the guy watched her. Finally she came again, gasping face down, hands on the rim of the tub, her hair stringy in the water.

  The small girl with the red painted toes came in. She had a dark appendix scar across the right side of her belly. “What happened to your arm?” she said. After a while she let him come into her but again he could not come and she took him hand and hand out on the grass under the gentle cool rain and sucked him softly for a long time but he still could not come. With a numb desolation he kissed her goodbye and got dressed and went back up the stairs where two men were kissing, one making little girlish sighs, the other’s hand on his crotch.

  He started the bike and roared up the driveway, slowed for the sidewalk, the bike skidding. Watch out, he reminded himself, liking how the yellow turn signal flicked, its steady dependable bursts, controllable. Long as you watch out you’re fine.

  He spun onto Pacific and tore down the block, letting the front wheel go up, feeling the back shimmy. The bike wanted to flip but he wouldn’t let it. Keep it under control, he told himself. Then you can have fun with no danger.

  He coasted through the Stop and dove down the steep drop of Steiner, engine screaming, up to eighty, let it back off, muffler blaring, the intersection coming up like a head-on collision but he eased the brakes not skidding and there was no one going through the intersection so he made it, sliding sideways down the next block, bouncing slow motion off a light pole, missing a parked Volvo and spinning to a stop.

  He looked up ashamed, as if everyone in the apartments nearby had seen him risk his life. The bike had died; he kicked it alive and rolled downhill and swung left on Lombard, beating the last lights and accelerating through the long wide approach to the Golden Gate Bridge, passing a Mercedes that flashed behind him in a blur of shrinking headlights, a Sirocco far ahead whipped past and vanished behind him, the bike screaming the roar of pure truth and he reminded himself be cool, don’t let it trick you, saw the needle bouncing at a hundred and forty but didn’t dare look down to be sure, the handles vibrating with road ripples, the curve straightening toward the bridge, a patch of mist and moths spattering his face, headlights the other way flying past like comets, wind thunder yanking his hair, the gray concrete wall a blur beside his knee.

  The bridge was a rising metal wave, the far tower climbing inside the near one, orange cones separating oncoming lanes and he wove among them; a pickup flashed past blowing its horn. He went up the hill under the Rainbow Tunnel and down into Mill Valley, took the exit to the sea, through rainy hills where eucalyptus scent dripped from the trees and sebaceous snail tracks slicked the road. A white owl flapped up from his headlight, a rabbit in its claws. The night was thick with manzanita and wild roses, thunder and smell of the sea cascading up the cliffs, rain washing his face.

  The bike was wild with anger to go faster, screaming up through the long Slide Ranch curve in third, a hundred, hundred and ten, slipping sideways on the dew-wet road but he could hold it, go as fast as it could go, could hold it, the Ecstasy hitting now, bringing everything in one and he loved it all, the speed, the world and all its night odors and sea crashing and all the girls and the engine roaring between his thighs as he tilted into the turn, and there was a cop car across the road and nowhere to cut and he swerved from the edge and the bike went down and soared off the highway and he slammed across the gravel shoulder and crashed into the manzanita.

  The world was spinning over and over, slapping him; he stopped tumbling and lay looking at the stars. An enormous noise, the smell of dust and crushed ice plants and manzanitas. He could fall between the stars. He went down to the Río, realized he had dreamed her and she was gone, gone for good.

  Deuce Harmony had dumped his Triumph in the rain and got decapitated by a Stop sign. Bikers who’d loved speed were spending their lives in wheelchairs. He touched his neck, head, arms and legs, could feel them all, stood carefully. No special pain. Voices and people coming down the hill. He pushed through the manzanita to the edge of the cliff but could not find the bike, climbed up to the highway, saw the CHP car and remembered.

  “You crazy fucker!” he screamed, running at a cop.

  More cops from all sides. Another CHP car. Cops with guns. “Cuff the son of bitch!” one yelled.

  He tried to back up, too late. They pinned his arms behind him, hard metal biting his wrists. “You assholes tried to kill me!”

  “Stupid maniac! You were doing a hundred thirty on that curve!”

  “I had it. I knew what I was doing! You assholes! Don’t you know anything?”

  “When you get him to San Rafael,” one said, “be sure to do a drug screen.”

  A plain car slid up, idling hard, a brown Dodge. Tall black guy, three others. “Thanks,” he said to the cops. “Y’all have a good evening, now.”

  “You really want him?”

  “C-6. No questions asked.”

  The tall guy grabbed Murphy’s bad arm and yanked him toward the brown Dodge. “Wait a minute,” Murphy said.

  “Wait nothing!” One of the other plainclothes guys popped open the Dodge’s trunk. The two CHP cars revved and pulled away. The tall black man took something small and black out of his jacket. A gun.

  “Wait!” Murphy screamed. The black man gripped the gun in both hands and smashed it down on his head; pain exploded inside him and he fell, grateful to be nowhere.

  39

  THE HUEY FELL in a pocket and he pulled back the collective pitch lever but it didn’t respond and he shoved the cyclic to drive it sideways but the ship kept dropping and green tracers leaped up from the treetops; he kicked the pedals but the tail wouldn’t swing, the Huey spinning as the tracers closed in and he screamed, “Take it!” to the copilot but the copilot was hit, blood spraying everywhere, wounded grunts screaming in the back, the cockpit filled with smoke and the jungle of dark killers reaching up for them.

  The ambulance surged forward, the differential whirring beneath him. He tried to change position on the stretcher but found he was bent backwards, wrists pinned to ankles. Not an ambulance, a dustoff. Shot down but the medevacs found us. Tied down so won’t fall off. Must be shot in the head, can’t see.

  Hard to breathe. Not an ambulance. Trunk of a car, this. The car bounced on a bump and pain crashed through his head. They hit me on the head. CHP, the tall black guy.

  He bent himself harder backwards to reach his ankles, grabbed a shoelace but dropped it, found it again but the knot had tightened. He kicked the shoe loose but it fell beyond reach.

  The engine slowed. He gripped the shoe with his toes and pulled it toward his hands, tugged out the inner sole but it was the wrong shoe. He yanked the other off and pulled out the knife, cut the cord round his ankles. The engine roared; the car swerved, dropped from macadam onto dirt, gravel spattering the under-side.

  The car was c
limbing through S-turns, springs jouncing in the ruts. He dropped the knife and doubled himself up to slide the cuffs under his buttocks, tearing his shoulder sockets, the metal cutting his wrists. He slid his cuffed hands forward under his thighs and feet, had them now in front, squirmed round to pick up the knife and held it in his teeth. The brake drums squealed, the trunk’s interior glowing from the brake lights. He found his shoes and shoved them on, with one hand squeezed the knife under the trunk lid and popped it open, holding it down with the other hand. The car halted, he leaped from the trunk, ran through a wire fence across a mucky ditch toward a low white building, men shouting, the car’s tires shrieking after him, its headlights bouncing over the ditch and he ducked into the white building’s ammoniac darkness of screeching chickens, his nose smashed something hard − a perch − and he darted out the back door across a dirt road, sprinting awkwardly with his hands cuffed before him, dogs snarling along a fence, the car gaining as he jumped a corral fence and dashed uphill into an orchard and above it a pasture; the dogs poured out of the kennel and came howling up the hill behind him. There was a cyclone fence; he climbed and wriggled through the barbed wire on top and down to a chaparral slope, the dogs hitting the fence, their fangs clanging steel.

  He ran up a rolling meadow, the stars bright above, to the ridge top. Headlights far below wound sleepily along a country road, over a bridge past a cutbank then a small white house with an orange pickup in the driveway, illuminating a stone wall along the shoulder, a yellow curve sign, then slipping around a ridge out of sight.

  Voices and dogs coming up fast. He ran downhill and splashed across a creek, climbed through alders to the road as more headlights came up fast behind him. A Ford slid by, a pebble ticking in its hubcap, its searchlight raking the slope and bouncing off the red alder trunks inches over his head. The Ford passed the white house, the pickup truck, the stone wall, and vanished round the curve.