by Robert Stone
Marge shrugged. “He’s an old-timer. They’re weird.”
There was nothing nice for Holy-o that night. He walked Stanley to the door and stood looking into the street with a worried expression. He was worried about the danger of Indian attack.
For several weeks there had been a thing between Indians and Samoans in the cities around the Bay and Holy-o was afraid that the Indians would get him one night. He had stopped going by the Third Base Bar on the way to his hotel and instead waited until two Samoans who worked as janitors at the Examiner drove around to pick him up.
While Holy-o waited for the other Samoans and Rowena waited for her boyfriend, Marge found herself waiting as well. They sat in the office under National Geographic pictures of American Samoa and photographs of Holy-o in his Coast Guard uniform. On the wall over the door, Holy-o had hung a portrait shot of a cheerful red-headed woman with an Elvis Presley haircut—it was a photo of Miss Dowd, who had been the Odeon’s cashier until the previous year. Miss Dowd had been murdered in her cage by a demented mooch and her picture held a dreadful fascination for Rowena.
“I wish I didn’t know about it,” she told Marge and Holy-o.
Holy-o closed his eyes. “Don’t even think about it.”
But Rowena continued to squint up at Miss Dowd’s rosy features.
“Wow,” she said, “there are sure some creeps around.”
“A hippie,” Holy-o said grimly.
“C’mon,” Marge said. “Wasn’t it just a guy with long hair?”
“It was a hippie,” Holy-o said. “I was there, I oughta know. She died in my arms.”
Holy-o’s arms were short but powerful, encased in shiny blue Dacron. Marge looked at them and wondered what it would be like to die there.
“A hippie thrill killer,” Holy-o said, running the brandy over his anger. “It wasn’t even a ripoff. It was for laughs.
“Peace and love,” he said. “The cocksuckers.”
Rowena pouted. “It was just one person, Holy-o.”
“One person shit,” Holy-o said. “What about that bug up in Yellowstone Park? He had his pockets full of human finger bones. He ate his victims, the cocksucker.”
“Like in Samoa,” Marge said.
Holy-o flashed his wet hooded eyes. “That’s bullshit,” he said. “Boy, just let one hippie show up in Samoa. Just let one show up. They’d fix his ass.”
“You know, Holy-o,” Rowena said, “just because the papers say something and J. Edgar Hoover says something doesn’t make it true. Like this whole Charlie Manson number . . .”
As she spoke, Holy-o appeared to tremble. It was impolitic to provoke him further.
“We agreed,” Marge said, “not to talk about him.”
Rowena got up to go to the bathroom again. Holy-o looked after her with distaste.
“She goes to the toilet a lot,” he said. “You think she’s stuffin’?”
Marge shook her head.
“She don’t know much,” Holy-o said. “In the old days was the original bohemians. A lot of times the bohemian was really educated and a patron of art. Then you got the beatnik, maybe a lower class of person. Now you got fuckin’ hippies everywhere.”
“Holy-o,” Marge said, “you know a writing doctor, don’t you?”
Holy-o shook his head as though he were telling her no.
“So what?” he asked.
“If you can get dilaudid, I’d like some.”
“What for? You got a pain?”
“Just wanted to try it.”
“Try it?” He seemed to think trying it was a very strange notion. “You have a habit, Marge?”
“I just thought I’d like to get off,” Marge said.
“Forget it,” Holy-o said. “You ought to go out more. You don’t need to tell your old man everything.”
“I sort of like the idea of dilaudid,” Marge said. “I can get some dolophine but I thought I’d dig dilaudid more.”
“Dolophine is very bad,” Holy-o said. “It’s methadone. It’ll kill you. You do better with scag.”
“I don’t want to know those people. Not on my own.”
Holy-o smiled. “They’re just fellas,” he said.
When Rowena came back from the bathroom they watched her for popping signals.
“Hey,” she said to Marge, “how was New York? I want to hear about it.”
“I forget,” Marge said. “I forgot I was there.”
Someone was out in the lobby rapping on the tin doors; Holy-o went over and opened them slowly, holding the truncheon. It was Rowena’s boyfriend; he and Rowena shared an apartment onNoe Street and went to State. His name was Frodo.
“Jesus, it smells weird in here,” Frodo told Holy-o.
Rowena went out to meet him.
“It really does,” she said. “I notice it the first thing I come in.”
Frodo giggled.
“It smells like the zoo. Like the monkey house.”
The folds of brown flesh slid slowly across the surface of Holy-o’s eyes.
“Next time,” he told Rowena, “meet your boyfriend in the street.”
“No reflection on you,” Frodo said.
When Rowena and Frodo were gone, Marge started down the center aisle toward the back door and the parking lot. Holy-o called her back.
“I could give you a few hits,” he said. He looked at her as though she were a child. “How do you want to do it?”
“I don’t know. Just swallow it.”
“O.K., Marge,” he said kindly.
He had it in his pocket. He shook four tabs out of a plastic pillbox and into Marge’s palm.
“Twenty bills. You pay me Friday.”
He had overpriced it to put her in his debt.
“Dowd liked this,” he said. “She liked it a lot.”
His voice thickened as he spoke, his eyes shone. Marge smiled her gratitude and watched him. It was a seduction. The shit would seal some chaste clammy intimacy; there would be long loving talks while their noses ran and their light bulbs popped out silently in the skull’s darkness.
“She liked girls too, didn’t she, Holy-o?”
Holy-o smiled.
“Yeah, she liked girls but what she really liked was dilaudid.”
Loneliness. He wanted it to be like Dowd again.
She thanked him and he told her not to take them all at once and not to take the first one yet since she had to drive. Then he walked her through the back door as he always did and stood by until she was in her car. Every night he performed the same gestures of vigilance—looking to the left and right, at the fire escape above the door and around the corner of the building.
When she was behind the wheel he scouted the alley for her and waved her on toward the street. As she came abreast of him he leaned down to the car window.
“You’re gonna find this is good shit,” he assured her. “People really like it and they’re not just crazy. You see guys that are lazy bums and they turn into hustlers. They’re out on the street first thing in the morning ‘cause they wan’ it.”
“I guess that’s the chance you take.”
“Yeah,” Holy-o said. “Absolutely.”
“With me,” Marge said, “it’s a matter of principle.”
Holy-o hastened to agree that it was. He nodded as she drove away and it was as if there were no Indians in all of San Francisco. She had never seen him so happy.
She took Mission to the bridge approaches. Her car was a yellow 1964 Ford and Marge was very fond of it because of the way she thought it suited her. Marge on wheels knew herself to be a thoroughly respectable sight—she and the car together projected an autumnal academic dash that might even evoke nostalgia if one had enjoyed 1964. Cops almost never stopped her.
Her house was directly up hill from the first Berkeley exit, on the first block of rising ground. Not very far away was the corner where the Oakland Police had stopped the Vietnam Day March and Marge had been there although she had not lived in Berkeley then. It h
ad been eight years since Vietnam Day.
She let herself into the building and climbed up two flights of fine redwood paneled stairway to the apartment. Before putting her key in the lock she rapped twice on the door.
“Margie?”
It was Mrs. Diaz, the baby-sitter.
“Hi,” Marge said as she went in. “Everything O.K.?”
She walked past Mrs. Diaz and straight into the room where Janey was sleeping.
“Sure,” Mrs. Diaz said. “Your father called.”
Janey was huddled in her yellow blanket. Her mouth was open and her breathing thick and bronchial.
“Damn,” Marge said. She found another blanket in the closet and placed it over the child.
“Did he want anything special?”
“He asked you to call him tomorrow.”
In the kitchen, she put a pot of water on for instant coffee.
“So,” Mrs. Diaz asked, “how’s life on Third Street?”
“Oh, you know,” Marge said. “Sordid.”
The dilaudid tabs were in the pocket of her cardigan. She took one out and swallowed it.
“You take your life in your hands down there.”
“It doesn’t bother me,” Marge said. “After working three years for UC I’d just as soon take my life in my hands.”
She stood listening to the water beginning to boil and waiting for Mrs. Diaz to leave.
“Would you stay and have a cup of coffee?”
“No,” Mrs. Diaz said, “I have to go.”
As Mrs. Diaz put her cotton raincoat on, she asked Marge how her husband was doing in Vietnam. Marge said that it seemed as if he was O.K.
“You ought to get together with my niece,” Mrs. Diaz said. “Her husband is over there too.”
“Really?” Marge asked.
“Don’t you worry? If it was my husband I’d worry.”
“I do,” Marge said. “But he’s always been lucky.”
Mrs. Diaz winced.
“You shouldn’t say that. But I guess he’s getting a lot to write about, huh?”
“He ought to be.”
“You said he was writing a book about it?”
“Yeah, he wants to write about it. A book or a play or something. That’s why he went.”
“Boy, if that isn’t crazy.” Mrs. Diaz said. “I’m sorry but it’s so crazy when he could be here. There’s plenty here to write about.”
“He’s a funny guy,” Marge said.
When Mrs. Diaz was gone, Marge went back to Janey’s room and listened to the child’s breathing for a while. Then she went back into the living room and sat in front of the television set without turning it on.
She lit a cigarette and dialed her father’s number in Ath-erton.
Her father’s friend Frances answered—Frances with the silicone tits.
“Six oh nine nine,” Frances said. “And three A.M.”
Marge had known that they would still be up, and she knew also that her father had picked up on the other extension.
“Hello, Frances. Hello, Elmer.”
“Hi,” Frances said and hung up.
“You’re all right?” Elmer Bender inquired.
Marge put another dilaudid capsule in her mouth and washed it down with coffee.
“I just took a pill,” she told her father.
“How nice for you.”
She waited and in a moment he asked, “Are you suicidal?”
“No, I’m just fucking around. I feel kind of deranged.”
“Come and see me tomorrow. I’d like to hear about New York.”
“Is that why you called me?”
“I wanted to know how you are. Why don’t you go see Lerner if you’re deranged?”
“Lerner,” Marge said, “is a senile Viennese asshole. And he’s a lech.”
“At least he’s clean,” Elmer Bender said.
“I’ll come see you. If not tomorrow—soon.”
“Are you still getting intimidation from that guy in Santa Rosa?”
“No,” Marge said. “He went away.”
“What’s your situation?”
“How can I tell you? Your phone is tapped.”
“Of course,” Elmer said, “so what?”
“I’m off sex. Sex is just a room full of mooches jerking off in their pants.”
Elmer Bender was silent for a moment. In the course of one of their conversations, Marge had discovered that he had a horror of lesbianism and that he worried that she might begin sleeping with women. It seemed that her mother had been known to.
“Don’t you think it’s time John came back?”
“That’s gonna be strange,” Marge said. “Really strange.”
“I think the whole thing has gone on long enough. It was nuts, you know? What good is coming from it?”
Marge felt herself sinking into the chair she sat in. She felt as though she were sinking into its blue fabric in the most literal way. She held the phone to her ear with her left hand and stretched her right arm with the fingers extended toward the bay window that overlooked the street. It was satisfying to hold her arm that way. The shape the window viewed from her chair began to suggest a Larger World.
“How about a larger world?” she asked her father.
Elmer sighed.
“Marge, go to sleep, my baby. Be sure and see me tomorrow.”
Some kind of wind had risen outside and was whistling through the rotten window casement and the ill-fitted panes. Marge sat facing the window, listening to the wind until it faded into a greater stillness. Her father’s voice was still with her and she felt as though some essence of him remained in the room—a dry, abrasive, maddeningly reasonable essence. Points of light struck her eye as though reflected from his rimless spectacles.
“You would shit, wouldn’t you?” she said to him.
She stayed in the chair surrounded by immensities of silent time. At the core of it, within her, a righteous satisfaction was rising. She sensed the outer world as an infinite series of windowed rooms and she felt a clear confidence that it contained nothing which she could not overcome to her satisfaction.
It was very unlike Marge to sit so long without fidgeting, even when she was alone. There was a noise in the street outside and although she could not identify it, she used it as a handle and made herself stand up. Upright, she was weary but unafraid. Not since she was much younger had she felt so satisfying a commitment as she felt to the caper and to the dope that would be on the water. High, she was party to it, in communion.
“All right,” she said. It was all right.
When she saw herself in the mirror, she smiled and raised a hand to her mouth. She advanced on herself cautiously but with dignity, turning round before her turning image. When she examined her eyes she saw that the pupils were tiny and surrounded by what seemed enormous areas of gray.
Dilated. Dilaudid. Praise dilaudid.
“We are not afraid today,” she said. Old song.
Us against them, she thought. Me against them. Not unlike sexual desire. The quickening of that sense brought her into other rooms and she flashed the mooches’ fingers laboring over their damp half-erections, burrowing in the moldy subsoil of their trousers like arachnids on a decomposing log.
It made her laugh and shudder.
On the redwood table nearby there was a letter from him but she kept her hands away from it. He would be in Saigon, twelve hours removed—certainly alive somehow, probably afraid.
When she thought about him, she often wondered if there was a proper way to punish him for being there without her, or instead of her. But she felt at peace with him now.
She closed on the mirror and looked in her own eyes again.
Diluted.
When she felt herself leaning backward she turned and partly sat on the edge of the table where his letter was; she could see herself in profile now, her body bent at the buttocks which the last mooch had been so concerned to see.
“Your ass is on the line,” Marg
e told herself aloud.
And it did seem to her that she looked vulnerable.
Deluded. Dilaudid.
She straightened up and walked from one light to another, turning them out. When the room was darkened she was aware of a glow from the street. It seemed the wind had stopped, and going to the window she saw that the street was hushed with fog and the street lights ringed with rainbows. It was all fine.
In the bedroom she passed Janey’s crib and heard the troubled breathing. Vulnerable.
But it’s righteous, she thought.
She straightened the child’s blankets and undressed with pleasure. Lying in bed, she thought of him without wanting to hurt him at all. Us against them would be best.
And when she closed her eyes it was wonderful. She passed into a part of the sea where there was infinite space, where she could breathe and swim without effort through limitless vaults. She fancied that she could hear voices, and that the voices might belong to creatures like herself.
IT WAS A NICE CROSSING, EXCEPT FOR THE AGENTS aboard. The trade winds were soft and the nights were starry and Hicks found time each morning, while the breakfast rolls and corn muffins were cooling, to do his exercises on the flight deck.
When they tied up at Subic and the liberty sections made for the lights of Olongapo, Hicks stayed aboard to observe the agents. There were three or four, disguised as hippies; they offered joints, giggled, and prowled the rows of disabled aircraft looking for stashes.
His own first stash had been in the mangled tail section of a Seasprite helicopter but he had moved it after a day, to lie under moldering naval heraldry in a disused flag locker. When they cleared Subic. he moved it again, stuffing the package in a flag bag and immersing it in a marked sack of cornmeal which he had set aside for the purpose. With it, he secreted two pairs of binoculars which he had stolen on the trip out and a Sunday Services pennant for a souvenir.
Each evening, he played chess with Gaylord X in the crews lounge. The civilian crew of the Kora Sea observed strict social segregation, so Hicks and Gaylord played in nearly total silence. After each game Gaylord would say, “Ah, thenkew,” and Hicks would reply, “My pleasure.” His pleasure was quite genuine for. on this trip, he won every game. There had been one match during which Gaylord had rallied superbly in the end game—but at that point several of his fellow nationalists had sauntered by to kibitz and his counteroffensive collapsed under the strain of representing the race. Gaylord was the second cook, a Black Muslim and a secret Rosicrucian.