“I like to pay my debts,” I said, “and I consider this one paid in full.” But she was back at the money, and I could have been talking to the wind or the soft rain or the stately, silent firs.
Driving away, I hoped Sarah would forgive me as I felt the plain woman’s kiss burning on my damp face.
—
While I waited, parked on the ferry dock, for a ride back to the mainland, the effects of my grand gesture wore off quickly. What the hell did I have in mind? Here I was passing Sarah’s money around like Christmas candy, and all the things I knew about the driver of the yellow Toyota filled me with sadness instead of knowledge, and I couldn’t tell Sarah about his death without making her an accessory to my crimes. I climbed out of the T-bird and leaned against the dock rail. And what was I doing in these goddamned rich man’s clothes? Maybe I thought they would make me bulletproof? Shit. I felt like ripping them off and throwing them into the cold green scummy water slapping under the dock. I settled for sailing the stupid gray hat over the gentle waves. Several gulls checked it out in the air, decided it wasn’t worth eating, even though gulls will eat garbage that would gag a buzzard. While it still floated on the water, one of the gulls landed on it and seemed terribly surprised when the hat promptly sank. Jonathan Livingston Seagull Shit.
During the boat ride I sulked in the car, decided I would go back to the motel and clear my sinuses before I made any more major decisions—such as what I was going to do with all that dope. I had kept it so long after Rausche’s death that not even my best friends would believe that I had kept it out of any other impulse than greed. It was great cocaine. I could keep on keeping it, maybe, but considering the sort of additive fool I had proved to be throughout my life, that much good coke in my hands would probably be the death of me. Maybe I could sell it to make up for some of Sarah’s money. But I was six hundred miles from home. When I got back to the motel down in Renton I played my only card; called my dealer in Meriwether, Raoul.
Raoul tried to act like a street-wise Puerto Rican from New York, and he affected leather slouch hats, brightly colored leather jackets, and red-tinted glasses day and night, but in fact, he was the son of a Jewish fuel-oil dealer in Pittsburgh. He had even gone to Harvard for a couple of years before he split to become a cook on the Alaskan pipeline, where he had discovered the joys of dealing and of freedom in the Wild West. He knew better, knew he was on a one-way ticket to the slammer, but he had been popped once in Phoenix, lost his stash and his cash, and now he was in debt so badly to the wholesalers and the lawyers that he had to keep dealing just to stay out of jail and alive.
When I finally got him on the telephone, he wasn’t very happy about it, but I promised him a sixty-forty split, and he said he would see what he could do. Twenty minutes later he called me back, told me I wouldn’t believe these people, wouldn’t believe how flaky they were, told me to carry a piece and to hire some armed backup if I could. Just as I had with the bartender’s advice the night before, I dismissed it without thought.
As a result, two hours later in a country house on the Olympic Peninsula across the Sound from Seattle, I found myself lying flat in a dusty hallway while a skinny girl with pimples subjected me to a very thorough and not very pleasant search, and another, even more emaciated woman, who looked like a high-fashion model, held a sawed-off 12-gauge shotgun against the back of my neck. At the end of the hall a fat girl in a baggy gray sweatshirt covered with the names of famous women held two huge and slobberingly angry Rottweilers on a short leash. Lying there, convinced I had dug my grave this time, I vowed to start listening to more advice. If they didn’t blow my head out from between my ears, that is.
“He’s clean,” Pimples said, “nothing but car keys and this.” And she tossed this, a small packet of cocaine, down to the fat girl. She caught it and growled at the Rottweilers, who sat down at her feet, stopped drooling and started wagging their tails like dumb puppies. I stayed put, the shotgun barrels and Pimples’ knee holding me on the floor. Hysterical, hushed giggles came from the mouths of unseen people and skittered like day-blind bats down the hallway.
“Shut up,” the fat girl said, and the laughter stopped at once. She walked away, came back a few minutes later, and said, “Okay, bring the jerk in here.”
“Does she mean me?” I asked as the bony knee and the black steel holes lifted.
“Oh, does she ever,” the model answered in one of those cultured drawls that always make me think of Vassar or Smith. “Jerk.”
As I hobbled stiffly down the hallway, easing around the dogs, who were bored with me now, my knees shook so badly that I nearly collapsed. One scare too many. Once during Korea, Jamison and I had spent thirty-six hours under a Chinese artillery bombardment. We had started screaming “no more” before the first five minutes had passed. That’s how I felt now.
“Well, I do believe the big boy’s just about to wet his pants, momma,” the cultured voice murmured behind me.
“You bet your sweet ass,” I whispered over my shoulder. She sneered like a brain-damaged collie, dug the shotgun into my kidney, then shoved me toward a Victorian chair, where I collapsed on the brocade in a sweat-damp puddle. She stood behind me, tapping the barrels lightly on the wood trim, and the fat girl sat down on a couch on the other side of the room.
“This is pretty good shit,” she said. “Where’d you get it?”
“Does it matter?”
“If it’s hot, it might matter one hell of a lot.”
“It’s not exactly hot,” I said.
“What the hell’s that mean?” she asked, smiling. Oddly enough, the smile made her plump face sweetly pretty. If she washed her hair and lost thirty pounds, she could turn heads.
“It came into my hands by accident,” I said, “as part of another business deal. And nobody knows I have it.”
“We do,” the model said, stroking my ear with the shotgun.
“Usually I like a little more history,” the fat girl said, “before I do business…but Raoul vouches for you, and if anything goes wrong, I’ll send Lovely there to see you…”
“And I’ll blow your fucking head off, jerk, cut off your nuts and stuff them down your throat,” the model crooned.
“Lovely,” I said, and the fat girl laughed.
“Where’s the rest?” she asked.
“In a briefcase in the trunk of the car,” I said. Not all of it, though. I had taken the liberty of buying two briefcases and had mailed one to myself with about a quarter of an ounce hidden in the handle.
The fat girl picked up the car keys off the coffee table and tossed them to Pimples where she stood at the edge of the hall. But her aim was slightly low, and one of the Rottweilers snapped them out of the air as if he were catching flies. “Orlando,” the fat girl said quietly, “give.” And the dog dropped the keys on the floor, curled up, and started licking his anus.
“Orlando?” I said.
“He’s from Disney World,” the model drawled. “Aren’t you?”
The fat girl’s eyes crinkled with amusement, and the strange giggles came again, creeping out of a side room, followed by a string of coughs and a cloud of marijuana smoke.
“Carry the briefcase flat and with both hands,” I said to Pimples, “because there’s a live grenade inside with the pin pulled.”
The fat girl burst into honest laughter, but the model slapped me on the head with the shotgun. “Aren’t you Mr. Smartypants,” she said. “Let’s kill the asshole, momma, and drop him in the Sound.”
“He’s too much fun,” the fat girl said, and I tried to look charming in my sodden three-piece suit.
When Pimples brought the briefcase to me, she handled it as if it were her very own baby. I sat it on the Oriental rug, disarmed the booby trap, held the grenade in one hand and the pin in the other, then scooted the briefcase across the rug to the fat girl.
“Now we can negotiate,” I said, “on semi-even terms.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a teen-aged
boy with long hair, wearing tattered overalls but no shirt, stick his head around the edge of the doorframe. “He ain’t shittin’,” he whispered to somebody behind him.
“You cretins sit down and shut up,” the fat girl said without looking up as she hefted the loosely wrapped black plastic bundle.
“I’ll go with your weight,” I said into her silence, thinking that was why she kept holding the package. But she wiped some of the pinkish gray powder on her sweat shirt and looked up at me.
“Jesus Kee-rist,” she muttered, “that fucking pimp Raoul don’t know shit from wild honey. He told me you were some jerk off the street, man, but you must have balls the size of a gorilla. I am truly impressed.” I didn’t have any idea what she was talking about, but I tried to sneer confidently and look casual at the same time. The fat girl shook her head, gathered the dusty black plastic into a wad, and tossed it to Pimples. “In the woodstove, baby,” she said, “and now.”
“Good idea,” I said. Even if I was a jerk, Raoul, whose real name was Myron, was going to regret his mouth when next I saw him.
As she took her scales out of an inlaid Japanese box on the coffee table and weighed the cocaine, the fat girl kept glancing at me, a coy, little-girl’s smile flickering about her mouth. “I make it a hair more than five and a half ounces,” she said, finishing her work. “Let’s all do a couple of lines,” she added, taking a screen, a razor blade, and a small mirror out of the inlaid box, “and call it five and a half. Okay?”
“I never touch the stuff,” I said primly. “Five and a half is fine with me.”
“The way you make your living, man, I don’t blame you,” she said as she chopped lines.
I nodded like a man who knew what was going on, shifted my damp shorts out of the crack of my ass, and took a tighter grip on the slippery grenade.
The fat girl snorted two short lines, as did Pimples, but the model declined, saying she would wait until I had gone, downer that I was, then she tapped me lightly again with the shotgun.
“Can’t you get her to stop that?” I said. “What sort of business are you running here, anyway?”
“We’re sort of a family,” the fat girl said, even happier than she was before. “Usually we conduct ourselves in a more professional manner, but this is a different deal. That’s why we’re doing it—for fun. You’ve got a fucking grenade, Lovely’s crazy about using her shotgun—what the hell, let’s enjoy.”
“Let’s finish our business,” I said as Pimples carried the mirror into the side room, where the teen-aged voices burbled and the “Oh, wow’s” and “Good shit’s” twanged.
“Right,” the fat girl said. “You want to dicker or you want to get down.”
“Down.”
“Okay, fine,” she said. “It’s worth eleven, but it ain’t got no history, you understand. I was going to offer you six, but I figure you’ve got your ass covered pretty good, and I’ve loved meeting you, so I’ll go seven, tops…No, seven and a half, fuck it.”
“Done,” I said. During this last part of the business, the model had grown bored, wandered toward the gray, rain-streaked window, the shotgun propped against the exquisite flare of her collarbone. “There’s another item under the back seat,” I said.
“Get it, Lovely,” the fat girl said, and the model slinked out, looking even more bored. “You sure you don’t want a taste?” she asked me.
“If it goes to shit,” I said, “it might as well go to shit with happy noses.” She laughed, shouted at Baby in the other room. When she brought the mirror back, the fat girl brought it to me, held the mirror and the glass straw for me, and when I had finished, she kissed me on the forehead. “Thanks,” I said.
“Anytime,” she said. “No chance you’d put the pin back in the grenade, huh?”
“No chance.”
She laughed as the model came back inside with the kilo of marijuana. She threw it to the fat girl, snarled something I didn’t hear, then went back behind my chair.
“I like your style, man,” the fat girl said as she sliced the black plastic wrapping off the smoke with a silver dagger, “but we don’t handle pot.”
“It’s a gift,” I said, “a bonus.”
“Ah, do I ever like your style,” she said, wadding up the plastic and giving it to Pimples to dispose of. “Listen, man, anytime you want to do business—buy or sell or just get purely fucked up—you call me at this number”—which she repeated several times—“and ask for, ah…Joan, and tell her that you’re, ah…Leroy, and that you’ve got a bushel basket of fresh Dungeness crab. Leave a number, and I’ll get back to you. And listen, man, now you really can put the pin back in the grenade, man, because I wouldn’t jerk you around for love or money.” Then she paused to laugh. “Well, maybe love. I’ve always got enough money, but nobody ever has enough love.” Then she stood up, headed for the back of the house, still laughing.
“She eats pussy, you understand, don’t you?” the model whispered in my ear. I nearly jumped out of the chair. She had moved back behind me as quietly as a snake. “But you wouldn’t know about that, would you, tough guy,” she said, then smacked me along the jaw line with the shotgun.
Enough is enough. She might be mean, but she didn’t know not to touch the person you’re covering with a gun. I dropped the pin out of my left hand, grabbed the shotgun, and shoved it toward her, pointing the barrels toward the ceiling. Shit, she had the safety on, so I jerked the gun out of her hands, and popped her lightly in the gut with my right hand heavy with the grenade. I dropped her like a bad habit, and she fell to her knees like a nun seeking sudden forgiveness. I had forgotten about the dogs, but they just ambled over to lick the model’s face. Pimples grinned at me, then walked into the side room where the teen-aged boys were whispering.
“What happened?” the fat girl said when she came back in the living room with a sheaf of bills in her hand.
“Philosophical disagreement,” I said.
“Lovely can be a bitch, can’t she?” she said, then slapped the bills against her wrinkled jeans. “You want to count it?”
“It doesn’t seem necessary now, does it?”
“Way beside the point,” she agreed.
“Then put it in the briefcase,” I said, “and carry it to the car for me, okay?”
“Of course,” she said. “You wait right there, Lovely.” But Lovely didn’t answer, she just lay on her side, her eyes clenched tightly shut as the two Rottweilers mouthed her gently. As she opened the five locks on the steel-core front door, the fat girl said, “Aren’t you forgetting something?”
“What’s that?”
“The pin.”
“Fuck it,” I said, “it’s somewhere in the living room.”
She laughed wildly all the way down the driveway, laughed as I unloaded the sawed-off, laughed even as I handed her the gun and the grenade. She tossed the shotgun into a rain puddle, and as she took the grenade from me, our hands seemed to fire in the damp air.
“Now give me a kiss,” she said, brandishing the grenade. I tried, but we were laughing too hard. “And give me a call, you crazy son of a bitch.”
“Maybe I’ll just do that.”
As I drove down the muddy road, I watched her in my rear-view mirror, watched her pitch the grenade underhanded across the road and into a deep, thickly overgrown barrow ditch. The shrapnel must have blown a tiny clear-cut in the evergreen brush. In my last glimpse of the fat girl in the rear-view mirror, she was standing over the ditch in the smoke rising in the misty rain, surveying the damage and still laughing.
I couldn’t remember who said it—Freud? Margaret Mead? Phyllis Schlafly?—that no civilization could afford to send women to war because they would be too fierce.
—
If I had been the right sort of person, I would have some sort of remorse while I waited for the Bainbridge-Seattle ferry, would have suffered at least a modicum of moral regret, but, what the hell, if I started worrying about horrors of cocaine, who knew where I would sto
p worrying. Fluorocarbons out of our armpits and into the ozone? The next Ice Age? The dinky little star that made life possible going into nova? No, no, too much on my mind, too many troubles of my own. Sarah’s and Gail’s safety, and my own…
The pale, thin-faced man who had tried to look like a traveling salesman as he had tagged me from Ellensburg to Seattle leaned over the passenger deck rail watching the cars as they rumbled down the ramp onto the ferry. I turned up the collar of my trench coat, tried to look bored, and drove underneath him. I wanted a drink, and bad, but the shot of peppermint schnapps didn’t cut the fear out of my mouth.
I took my time going to the motel, circling back on my trail several times, until I was sure my tail was clean, but in the motel room I shoved the two heavy easy chairs in front of the door, checked the M-11 with trembling fingers, and thought about drying out. This was no time, though, for the shakes, so I had another shot of schnapps and looked at myself in the mirror. My four-hundred-dollar suit looked as if I had worn it on a crosscountry hike—dusty and damp from cuffs to collar—and my forty-dollar hairdo had a case of the terminal frizzies. Even naked after a shower, I still looked like a failure—saggy, bloated, and gray, like a stiff just fished out of Elliott Bay. I took the money out of the briefcase and spread it across the bed, but that didn’t make me feel any better either. “Balls like a gorilla,” the fat girl had said, meaning what I didn’t know. But I had to laugh. If only she could see them now.
I fell on the bed and picked up the telephone to call the colonel, but fell immediately asleep with the dial tone buzzing in my hand. And woke four hours later, long past sundown, drenched in sweat, hundred-dollar bills pasted like leeches all over my body.
—
The colonel answered his home telephone before the first ring finished. I said, “Milo,” and he gave me the number of a pay telephone, adding, “Ten minutes.” When I called him back, he didn’t even say hello, he just wanted to know who had tapped his lines. He sounded angry enough to curse, but he didn’t.
“I don’t know, sir,” I said. “I’m sorry. And sorry, too, for involving you in my mess.”
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