“Sold.”
“How are you paying, and I need to see ID.”
“Walker Reade’s account,” I say, pulling out my Connecticut license. This is what Claudia told me to say.
He pauses and reaches under the counter, pulling out a notebook, but his eyes never leave mine. “Devaney still up there?”
“Yeah, she is.”
He starts writing in the notebook with his left hand, the hook resting on the right-hand page. “So that means, hypothetically speaking, of course, that you could go out with me.”
“I suppose. Hypothetically speaking.”
“Look, I shouldn’t even be giving you this. Walker’s account is not in good standing.”
“So you’ll only give me the booze if I go out with you? There’s a name for girls like that, you know.” I’m mesmerized by the hook, trying hard not to stare but also trying hard not to not stare.
“I’m having a party tomorrow night.” He writes an address on the back of a card for the store. “Ask Devaney if she wants to come, too. She knows where I live.”
“A party, huh?”
“I presume you like to party?”
“I guess one would presume that given where I’m hanging my hat these days. I’m Alley.”
“Pete.”
I hold out my right hand to shake. He grabs it with his left and squeezes.
I cringe. “I’m sorry, I should have offered you . . .”
“It’s all right.” He laughs. “I do a mean high five with the right, but I didn’t know if you could handle it.”
Walker lives fifteen minutes outside Aspen in a small town known mostly for its local tavern. After I drop the liquor off with Claudia, she tells me that Walker wants to meet me there, at the tavern, for an early dinner.
“Maybe, you know, throw something on,” she says offhandedly, looking up and down at my jeans and T-shirt.
I can take a hint. Now that I’m here, officially hired, Claudia seems to be letting me know as subtly as possible that it’s time to play ball. I go back to the bedroom, scan through the new clothes Walker bought for me, put on the least offensive getup—the fuchsia minidress and a black jacket—walk down the mountain about a half mile, and spy the Caprice in the parking lot. As I turn to head inside, I see a bus full of tourists—bikers and hikers—turn onto Walker’s road.
The tavern is decorated with Christmas lights, and Tammy Wynette’s “D-I-V-O-R-C-E” plays on the jukebox at the far end of the room. A postage-stamp-size dance floor is in front of the jukebox. The floor looks newly sanded. The place smells of cigarette smoke and chili powder—a by-product of its Tex-Mex menu. Walker is sitting with the newspaper at a table by himself, chewing mindlessly on the filter of his cigarette as he peers through his reading glasses. Four shots are on the table—two in front of him and two in front of the place where I’m to sit.
“Did you get the booze?” he asks abruptly, not even looking at me.
I take my jacket off and sit down. “Barely.”
“What’s that mean? You look nice . . .”
“Your account . . .”
“That Captain Hook bastard. My account is fine.” Walker puts one of the shot glasses in front of me. It looks like a small, chocolate milk shake.
“What are we drinking?”
“Biffs.”
“What’s a Biff?”
“Shoot it.” He hands me one of the glasses in front of him.
“It tastes like Baileys and whiskey.”
“Very good.”
“It’s pretty gross.”
“Not after three of them. Then it’s genius.”
The waitress comes over. She has an overly large name tag with CANDACE engraved on it.
“Hi, sweetheart,” Walker says.
“What can I get you, honey?” Candace starts rubbing Walker’s shoulders and laughing at all of his jokes. She ignores the way his arm brushes her leg. After seeing how Walker tips, I completely understand the depth of her obsequiousness.
“Let’s see, two orders of the chicken enchiladas, two orders of the cheese enchiladas, three orders of the tamales, three burgers, very rare, four sides of fries, two more Biffs, and two beers, sweetie. Coors is fine.”
“You got it, baby.” Candace rubs the top of Walker’s head on her way into the kitchen.
“You expecting company?”
“Christ, I hope not.”
“Are you capable of any kind of, I don’t know, culinary restraint? How come you can’t just order an entrée and then I order an entrée. We split an app. Drink a little. Done.”
“It’s not interesting. I have a reputation to uphold.”
“A reputation for wasting food?”
“For excess, you moron.”
“I get it, but are four orders of french fries really buying you street cred?”
“What do you think?”
For the first time I really look around the tavern, which is nearly full. All of the patrons are in various stages of gawking at Walker. A group of drunk college guys in the corner are out-and-out staring. Various Aspen types are catching a glimpse through dark sunglasses, and some locals in cowboy hats and boots swing by to say hello as Walker holds court.
“Today is a good day,” Walker says to me. “We’re celebrating.”
I’m trying to figure out exactly how different a “celebration” might look from any other day out here.
“What happened?”
“Based on those two pages, Lionel is releasing some more of my advance. That rat bastard Hans finally got back; he’s upping my rate. And Larry’s coming out tomorrow for the weekend. Here.” He hands me another Biff, which actually does taste better the second time around. I’m definitely getting buzzed.
“I bought you some grappa today.”
“What the hell is that?”
“Really? The man who eats adrenal glands for breakfast doesn’t know what grappa is?”
“I don’t go in for those guinea drinks, sweetheart.”
“I didn’t realize you were so discriminating. But let me mix you a cocktail with it when we get home. Then you can tell me.”
“You look nice in that dress, you know.”
“Thank you.”
“Anna Magnani. She wouldn’t have worn that dress exactly, but you look like her.”
“I don’t know who that is.”
“Really? The proud guinea has no knowledge of one of Italy’s national cinematic treasures?”
“I don’t go in for those old movies too much.”
“Yeah, well, you should. She’s not beautiful, but earthy. You want to rub garlic on her nipples and lick it off.”
“Gross.”
“You should try it sometime.”
The ungodly assemblage of food starts to arrive, which I’m thankful for. The Biffs are hitting me pretty hard. Patsy Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces” comes on the jukebox.
“Hey, Walker, how about a picture?” The college boys have finally drunk enough courage.
“Sure, why not?”
One of them hands me a camera and the five of them group around Walker. They all have pints of beer, and Walker poses sideways with the Biff and his filtered cigarette.
“Okay, say beer.”
“Beeeeeeeeer.”
I take three snaps, and there are handshakes all around.
“Can we buy you guys a drink?” one of them says.
“Always,” Walker says. “Round of Biffs. Then we’ve got to chow, boys.”
“Thanks, Walker.”
“I need to head to the head.”
While Walker is in the bathroom, I notice that all eyes are now on me—me and my ridiculous dress, sort of drunk, chewing halfheartedly on a tamale. I am trying to appear serious—I am the woman out here for professional purposes, thank you very much—but this dress is not aiding the effort. I train my eyes on the bathroom door, waiting for Walker to come out. When he does, he is transformed. Not markedly—it’s as subtle as a twist in the corner of hi
s eye. But I’m fairly certain that nothing was, in fact, eliminated on this bathroom trip.
“I’m going tomorrow night to a party,” I say matter-of-factly as he sits back down.
“No, you’re not.”
“Yes, the guy at the liquor store invited me and Devaney. I mean, I figured it was Friday . . .”
“I’m sorry. Do you think you’re working at a bank? Some fucking temp job? Friday? Throw your calendar away, sweetheart. You’re not going anywhere.”
“Uh . . . okay.”
“You think this is a vacation? You’re here to help me. Get it? Nothing else. I mean nothing. And you are especially not here to work on your own writing.”
“What makes you think I’m working on my own writing?”
“Claudia, that’s what.”
One morning at the cabin a few days ago, Claudia had offhandedly asked me what I was doing. If it wasn’t crystal clear to me before where her loyalty lies, it is now. I’ll have to be more subtle.
“Don’t you care that I’m writing a book?”
“I care more that this beer is almost empty.”
“Did it ever occur to you that I want to learn from the best? That I might like a mentor?”
“Please, sweetheart. Did it ever occur to you that I don’t give two shits about you and your writing career? I have enough to worry about with my own.”
I reach into my jacket and grab a cigarette. Walker holds out his Zippo lighter, cupping his hand around it.
“It’s a fool’s job anyway. If I had to do it all over again, I’d go to law school. All the money I’ve paid lawyers over the years.” Walker has, thus far, lived through two divorces and several firearms violations. A wrongful-termination suit brought by a former assistant was thrown out last year. His most high-profile problem was one recent three-month legal odyssey, where an interviewer accused Walker of sexual harassment, an accusation that resulted in a search of the property, where various drugs and explosives were found (again, thrown out). Then there’s the whole host of hard-to-categorize offenses that have kept Walker’s lawyers busy over the years. I mean, what do you call it when you bring a leaking fifty-pound bag of lime into a crowded bar and stagger through the joint? Or set off a boatload of fireworks on a pig farm? Or douse your oversize Christmas tree in gasoline, shove it up your chimney, and set it on fire? When all has been said and done, it’s amounted to a collection of disturbing-the-peace and public-drunkenness violations. Walker’s cred is preserved. And the Tom-and-Jerry act with local law enforcement endures.
“You have a National Book Award and a Pulitzer and everyone here is staring at you. I think you’ve done all right.”
“Is that what you want? Everyone staring at you? So you can’t go out for a beer without the whole frat house wanting to hump you? You can’t eat that, sweetheart. Awards neither. You’ll go broke in this business. If you want to be famous, there are easier ways, especially for a girl.”
“You’ve never even read anything I’ve written.”
“And I don’t plan on it. Where’s our waitress?”
Walker flags down Candace and asks for two pieces of chocolate cake to go.
“Let’s get out of here.”
Once we’re in the car, he takes a small plastic bag out of his pocket and starts jamming whatever’s in it into the chocolate cake. He hands me a plastic fork. “Have a bite.”
“What is it?”
“Just eat it.”
“Jesus, Walker. At least tell me what it is.” He puts a forkful in front of me, and I see gnarly, dried globs in the cake. Mushrooms.
“You don’t trust me?” This question seems a little beside the point. Of course I trust that these are proper hallucinogenic mushrooms. The real question is if I want to do them. A few days prior I’d had something of an epiphany: I would treat my time out here like AA, but in reverse. Instead of adopting a “one day at a time” approach for not abusing substances, I was going to take that approach for abusing them. I grab the fork and chew slowly. Even buried in the chocolate the mushrooms have the consistency and smell of dried manure. Walker takes a couple of bites of his cake and starts up the Caprice. I notice the backseat has a blanket covering up something.
“Where are we going?”
“To have some fun . . .”
I pause to consider the terrifying-yet-liberating notion that anything could be under the blanket—a block of headcheese, an AK-47, a human torso, a flamethrower, five keys of coke. I light up two cigarettes and hand one to Walker as he puts the Caprice in gear and starts up the mountain. It’s still light outside, and Walker puts his hand on my knee, which he’s taken to doing every time we drive together, like we’re some old married couple. I don’t shoo his hand away, but my hand never covers his; instead I put my left hand under my armpit and smoke so I look like Bette Davis. It’s not exactly a “professional distance,” but it’s the closest thing to one I can maintain under these circumstances.
When we get to the top of the mountain road, the tourists I had seen before are in various stages of eating and hanging out. They instantly recognize Walker, and several of them start clapping and yelling and taking pictures. Walker stops the Caprice and I can feel the drugs starting to kick in a little. They’re my first-ever mushrooms, and the early reviews are good. It feels like the acid minus the edge—I’m just happy in a simple, uncomplicated way. We are both smiling widely, and when Walker reaches into the backseat, grabbing from beneath the blanket what appears to be not the Taser, but a small handgun, I’m so blindly amused that I don’t even pause to consider that someone might die. The group of hikers—about fifteen in all—recoil in unison. I see one of them run to a call box. Walker grabs my hand and puts it in his, and we shoot the gun together, straight up into the air, as he lets out a pronounced “Yee-ha.” The gun makes an awful screeching sound, and Walker and I fall back into the car as he guns the engine, launching us first in a big circle (as we are in a Caprice convertible, this move has all of the dramatic effect of trying to do a doughnut while riding on the back of a whale) and then down the hill. It occurs to me in a shroom-induced laughing fit that I am now a character in a Walker Reade novel. I am The Girl in the Car. It feels like we are on a great big roller coaster that only knows how to go downhill . . . fast. The Caprice winds down the mountain with a force seemingly its own. Walker and I are cracking up so hard we aren’t even making any noise. A parade of lights materializes behind us, and for a few seconds I am excited because I think we’ve stumbled upon a carnival. They appear so festive at first—the lights of two squad cars dancing in the setting sun.
“Quadruple fuck . . . Listen to me, sweetheart,” Walker says in his best Bonnie-and-Clyde voice. “You do not have to talk to the cops . . . ever. You get it? This is your right as an American citizen.” I nod and smile, completely unable to accept that we might be in some kind of real trouble. It feels like we’re on the set of a movie—a happy, happy movie.
Walker pulls into a driveway and the two cop cars stop behind us. They obviously know who Walker is and seem to process me, with my big smile and fuchsia minidress, as his flavor of the month, which might not be all that far off. There are two female cops and two male cops. The pair of women, both hefty redheads—they could be sisters—approach me.
“Can I see some ID, please?”
I’m looking at the cop sisters and their bad flame-red dye jobs, mesmerized by the shine on their badges, their extreme red-haired-ness. I briefly wonder if they’re Irish, my mind wandering to some picture of a Gaelic countryside with a hand-built stone wall where everyone wears cream-colored, cable-knit sweaters . . .
“Yoo-hoo,” one of them says to me, swiping a hand in front of my smiling face. “Hello?”
“We’re just here visiting our friend,” Walker says. “Unless we’re under arrest, we’ll be seeing you.”
Walker takes my hand. He seems impressed by my defiance in the face of authority, but my silence is born less from any political statement and more f
rom the fact that I’m shrooming out of my gourd. I can’t quite stop looking at the lights and all of that red hair.
“Walker, what were you doing on the mountain?” one of the male cops asks. He appears to be the kind of person with a fitness “regimen.” His partner has the feigned importance and baby-soft skin of a rookie. “You’re scaring the bejesus out of the tourists. Where’s the gun?”
“I don’t have any gun. It’s a screecher for scaring away crows. Not my fault they thought it was a gun.”
“Have you been drinking today?” the other cop asks. I can’t stifle a laugh. Have we been breathing?
“Are we under arrest?” Walker asks.
“Not yet, big guy,” Mr. Fitness says.
“Then we’ll be on our way.” Walker flings open the car door, pulls me across the front seat, and we start walking slowly toward the house in front of us. The cops behind us are in deep discussion. My guess is they don’t know if they should try to make a big score or stop messing with the local color.
“Walker,” one of the redheads calls out. “Dry out here a little before you go home. Get the girl home safe.”
“Thank you very much,” Walker says as he rings the doorbell. A bearded man with long hair and glasses wearing a plaid shirt and cargo pants appears at the door and lets us in, smiling widely, shaking Walker’s hand like he’s been expecting him all morning. He waits for the door to close completely before his face dissolves into disbelief, then rage. Then he starts laying into Walker.
“Really, Walker? You’re bringing the cops directly to my house? I was about to start flushing.”
“Sorry, Jim. It was all a little bang-bang.”
“Bang-bang is what I should do to your head. What are you on anyway?”
“The fungus, sir. It’s among us.”
Jim takes a quick look at me. Walker nods as if to say I’m all right.
“You need anything else?”
“Just a few minutes to make sure they’re gone.”
“Anything else?”
“What do you have?”
“What do you want?”
“I’m a little low on the drug.”
“You know I just left an envelope in the pig about an hour ago, right?”
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