She began a kind of slow march toward the house, arms swinging, and I followed. She ran the last few steps and opened the door. “WELCOME HOME, RAITCHEE,” came a woman’s voice from inside, after which a man guffawed and broke into a rasping cough. Rachel entered the house as if she’d forgotten that she had me in tow.
I hurried to catch up and was almost abreast of her in the hallway when a dark-haired young woman came running from the front room. She stopped in her tracks when she saw me. I knew from having scanned the photo albums that she was either Gloria or Carmen. Smiling, she looked back and forth between us, then put her arms around Rachel, who left hers at her sides. “Raitch,” she said, her eyes growing ever wider behind the large square lenses of her glasses as she stared at me. “Who might this boy be?”
“This is Wade.” Rachel sighed but didn’t turn to look at me.
“Waaaaade? And what is Wade to you, I wonder?”
“What are you guys doing here, Carmen?” Rachel said. Carmen was big-breasted like Rachel, but her shoulders were so narrow that she had to hunch, which made her look as if she were cringing in expectation of being sternly lectured for some wrong that she had done.
Carmen stepped back from Rachel, continuing to regard me with astonishment. “Oh my God, Fritz,” she shouted. “I think this boy named Wade has plucked our little Rachel.” She giggled. “It’s written all over her face, and his.”
“Well, come on in,” the man called from the front room, as if we were unexpected but welcome guests in his house. “I want to see this Wade. He better get all he can now, because he won’t be getting any when Mom and Dad get back.”
“What are you doing here, Carmen?” Rachel said.
Carmen looked away from me at last and put an arm around Rachel. “We haven’t seen you since our wedding in Halifax,” Carmen said, still smiling. “We missed you.”
The smell of hash, or weed, or something, wafted out of the front room.
“You’re stoned,” Rachel said just as I realized that Carmen was indeed quite stoned.
“Not stoned enough,” the man said from within. “Hi, Rachel.”
“Hi, Fritz,” Rachel responded warily.
“Come in, come in,” Fritz insisted.
Rachel turned to me at last and held out her hand. I’m sorry, her eyes said. Taking her hand, I attempted a confident, reassuring smile, which must have been a ghastly failure judging by the way she looked. She tugged me into the front room like a child who had been coaxed out of hiding to meet a grown-up.
A slender, dark-haired, lightly bearded young man sat cross-legged on the floor with his back to the fireplace. He was dressed like someone who had been a protester at Berkeley in the ’60s and didn’t know that his outfit was out of fashion. He wore a white smock with a deep V-neck that showed his hairy chest and was bordered with a pattern that made it seem like he was wearing a necklace of blue flowers. The bell-bottoms of his jeans were more widely flared than any I had seen in a decade. As if in a final tribute to the era of earnest hippies, he wore on his darkly tanned feet a pair of leather sandals with a single thong. How much of his bronze complexion was owing to his ethnicity and how much to a suntan, I couldn’t tell. He had a joint in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other.
“Well, Rachel,” he said, “introduce me properly to the young man whose beer I’m drinking.”
When Rachel said nothing, Carmen giggled again, then said, “Fritz, Rachel tells me this is Wade. Wade, meet my husband, Fritz Boonzaire.”
“Just Fritz is enough,” Fritz said. “You still can’t pronounce my last name.” Her smile vanished.
I let go of Rachel’s hand and, extending mine, walked across the room to Fritz. He looked up at me with the trace of a grin. He raised the joint and the beer bottle to indicate that his hands were full. I felt ridiculous for having made such an earnest offer of my hand.
“Well, well, Wade, Wade,” Fritz said, not to me, but to Carmen, who burst out laughing.
I felt Rachel’s hand on my lower back. “Hello, Fritz,” she said, as if she was making fun of his name.
“Hello, baby sister,” he said. “I do believe that Carmen’s right. You have been plucked. Or some word that rhymes with plucked. You’re positively glowing.”
“Fuck off, Fritz,” Rachel said.
“Read any good books lately?” Fritz said. “Look at it this way, Rachel. At least you’re not hung up on War and Peace. Lugging that thing around everywhere you go wouldn’t be much fun.”
Carmen laughed yet again and sat cross-legged on one of the green sofa chairs.
“You and Anne Frank are still an item, right?” Fritz said, looking at Rachel. “Anything or anyone that comes between you and Anne—”
“You are such a bastard, Fritz,” Rachel said.
“When the going gets tough, Rachel—”
“She told me all about it,” I interrupted.
“I very much doubt that you told him all about it, baby sister.”
“You should have said you were coming,” Rachel said. “I would have locked the house. Or burned it down.”
Fritz drew on the joint, held in the smoke, then grinned at me.
“Where did you drive from?” I said.
“Where did you drive from?” Fritz repeated, looking again at Carmen, who threw back her head and laughed and flopped back against the chair, her hands on her thighs.
“We drove all the way from Halifax,” she said. “We didn’t even sleep on the ferry. We had to be careful.”
“Shut up,” Fritz roared. Carmen bowed her head and twirled a loose thread on the hem of her jeans. “You know something, Rachel,” he said, “I bet Wade doesn’t know as much about you as he thinks he does.”
“Fritz,” I started, but Rachel grabbed my hand.
“Just joking, baby sister,” Fritz said, “although we did have a nickname for you when you stayed with us during the wedding…”
“Carmen,” Rachel said, “Mom and Dad left me to take care of the house. You should have called first.”
Carmen looked at Fritz, who, tossing the last of the joint over his shoulder and into the fireplace, stood up without uncrossing his legs or using his hands, his balance perfect. “A trick I learned in the national service. I used to do it while holding a rifle in my hands. I learned a lot of tricks.”
A half foot shorter than me, he sized me up. “Wade is a big boy,” Fritz said. “You always did like big joints, didn’t you, Rachel?”
Rachel squeezed my hand before I could object. I’d never heard an accent like his before. It seemed faintly Australian.
“Come on, Fritz, be nice,” Carmen said.
“Shut up,” Fritz said.
“He’s usually nice, isn’t he, Rachel, when he’s not so stoned?” Carmen said. “Fritz did all the driving from Halifax so that I could sleep. Wasn’t that gallant of him?”
“I didn’t trust her to stay awake,” Fritz said. “No matter what I give her, nothing works. She falls asleep. Rachel knows why, don’t you, Rachel?”
“She’s been shooting up ever since she met you,” Rachel said.
Placing his beer bottle on the mantel of the fireplace, Fritz stuck his hands in the pockets of his jeans. “I wonder what Wade’s story is,” he said. “I’m sure it’s a nice, ordinary Canadian story. Is he a hockey player, Rachel? Does he get good grades like you?”
“He did,” Rachel said. “He graduated from university.”
“A university graduate. I think Wade might be a lawyer. He looks like a lawyer. A corporate lawyer.”
“I’ll be a writer soon,” I said.
“ ‘I’ll be a writer soon,’ ” Fritz mimicked, grinning at Carmen, who flashed him a look that seemed meant to coax him into going easy on me. “A writer to replace Anne Frank, the one that Rachel lost. Is that how he got you into bed, baby sister, b
y telling you that he kept a diary? When I was his age, I was on border patrol between South Africa and South West Africa. I had rebels shooting at me. I shot back. I think I might have killed a few. I mean, I hope not, though they killed a few of my buddies. I didn’t know it then, but I should have been on their side. What business do white men from Europe or anywhere else have in Africa? Some people are going to do something about that. I’m looking forward to going back home.” He kept looking at Rachel, talking about me as if I wasn’t in the room. “So, Wade will soon be a writer. What’s Wade doing now?”
“He’s a reporter for a newspaper.”
“Only for a while,” I butted in. “Until the end of the summer, maybe.”
Fritz guffawed. “A summer job. That’s what students have, summer jobs. Not the kind that go on and on. The kind that go on and on are the ones that Wade knows he should avoid. I feel the same way about them, but I like my chances of avoiding them much better than his. Wade is very purposeful, isn’t he, Rachel? I bet that boys who want to write get laid a lot. He might be two-timing you or worse, baby sister. I knew a lot of guys like Wade when I was in the national service. Artists on border patrol, killing blacks to keep them from killing whites. Martial artists, you might say. A good pun, don’t you think? Your writer should be taking notes. But guys like Wade, they don’t age very well. Hans was the true hero, risking his own life to save people from the Nazis when he was only seventeen.”
“Fritz is a leather worker,” Carmen interjected. “His stuff is amazing.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Fritz said.
“Don’t talk to her like that,” Rachel said.
“Truce, baby sister. We’ll be gone in two days. Back home to South Africa.”
Carmen said, “I’m a South African citizen again, thanks to Fritz. And Fritz is a landed immigrant here.”
“Sort of like dual citizenship,” Fritz said. “Comes in handy in my line of work.”
“What is your line of work?” I said.
“ ‘What is your line of work,’ ” Fritz repeated. “Wade is not very fast on the uptake, is he?”
Carmen jumped up from her chair. “Raitch, we have, like, a ton of coke and ten thousand tabs of acid in the van.” Fritz had reached her by the time she finished speaking and slapped her hard across the face. “Fritz is Afrikaans,” Carmen said with barely a pause and as if he hadn’t touched her. “But he’s against apartheid. I mean he’s really against it, not like some people. He marched in the protests when Steve Biko was murdered. He might be part Bantu.” As Fritz raised his hand to strike her again, I headed for him, but was brought up short when he drew the first switchblade I had ever seen in my life and flicked it open.
“Stop,” Rachel shouted.
“He stopped,” Fritz said, “but I think there might be something running down his leg. He should go back and stand beside you, don’t you think, Rachel?”
“Come back to me, Wade,” Rachel said.
I backed up, keeping my eyes on the knife.
“Put it away, Fritz, please,” Rachel said, but he kept it pointed at me.
“He’s nice when he’s not stoned,” Carmen said. “He is, Wade, he really is.” She was not looking at me. “Lots of guys who get in trouble are. I write to guys in jail and they write back. They’re really nice. Lots of them are Americans who fought in Vietnam. You can find their addresses in the back of Rolling Stone. Fritz sends the money we make to South Africa to help get innocent black guys out of jail. It won’t be long until the whole place goes up in smoke and all the white people will get what’s coming to them, won’t they, Fritz? Someday?”
“Someday,” Fritz said, his tone almost wistful, his eyes closing and opening again as if some drug he’d taken had just kicked in. “Rachel, you and Wade sit down over there on the loveseat. When you sit down I’ll put this knife away.”
Though I didn’t resist, Rachel all but dragged me to the loveseat.
Carmen went to Fritz, put an arm around his waist and leaned her head on his shoulder as she looked at me. “The most he ever does with that knife is peel apples,” she said.
I thought he would hit her again, but he tapped her so lightly on the cheek it might have been a gesture of affection. “Your big mouth,” he whispered. “You should never open it when others are around.”
Fritz clicked the knife shut and returned it to his pocket. “Sorry, baby sister,” he said. “We wouldn’t have dropped in if we’d known you had company. I mean, what are the chances that you would have company?”
“So just go, then, Fritz,” Rachel said.
“But I haven’t told Wade yet what you’re famous for. Wade, no one can give a brain toke quite like Rachel.”
It was the first time he’d addressed me directly.
“I bet you don’t even know what that is, do you? I sometimes use it as a euphemism, but you’ll never guess for what.”
“Shut up, Fritz,” Rachel said.
“So,” Fritz said, “I know you will keep your mouth shut about what’s in the van. It’s big bad Wade I’m not so sure about. Does Wade understand that it won’t be the end of the story if we get caught? Does he understand that other people are involved? I bought what’s in that van with borrowed money. I would have to tell—let’s call them ‘them’—how we got caught. Does Wade understand what might be at stake?”
“I do,” I said. “You don’t have to keep asking her.”
“What about it, Rachel?” Fritz said.
“I think it’s safe for you to get lost, Fritz,” Rachel said.
“Well, I guess I’ll have to take your word for it, won’t I? It’s not as if I have a choice. It’s not as if I’m stupid enough to hurt Wade just to make a point. I mean, how would I explain it if I did?”
“You don’t have to hurt anyone,” Rachel said.
Fritz nodded.
“You don’t have to hurt Carmen again. She didn’t mean any harm.”
“Okay, Carmen,” Fritz said, “looks like we have to find another place to crash.”
Carmen left without so much as a glance at Rachel or me, tears streaming down her face. Fritz took the beer bottle from the mantel, drank it dry and brought it down hard on the coffee table. “Thanks for the hospitality, baby sister,” he said, and sauntered out of the room.
Rachel followed him out. I heard the van starting up. A few seconds later, Rachel came back. “They’re gone,” she said. “For now.” She sat on the loveseat, elbows on her knees, hands on either side of her face, holding back her hair.
“I shouldn’t have provoked him,” she said, as if she was thinking out loud. “I wouldn’t have if I had known. He was pretty out of it. Almost as bad as Carmen, even if he didn’t act like it at first. Carmen was starting to come down from something, I think. Heroin, maybe. I feel so bad for her. I should have seen how bad things were in Halifax. But it was a wedding. You have to pretend that everything is fine. But you don’t have to fool yourself into thinking that it is.” She shook her head as if to ward off a dizzy spell and looked at me at last.
“What he said about you maybe not knowing as much about me as you think you do? I used to get stoned a lot, and I dropped acid with them sometimes when we went back to Cape Town in ’75, when Dad had a sabbatical. I did a bit of coke, too, but I never touched heroin. We all used to do drugs except for Gloria. She doesn’t even drink. But I want you to know that I was never like Carmen, and the most I’ve done for years is have a toke now and then. Have you ever—”
I shook my head.
Rachel smiled. “Once, when I was on acid, I thought Dad was the Planters peanut man.”
I sat beside her and took her hands in mine. I could think of nothing to say.
“You know what I like about you,” she said. “You don’t follow the crowd. I mean, you don’t follow any crowd. I’ve never met someone who wanted to be a writer or w
anted to be anything out of the ordinary and was actually doing something about it instead of just wanting to and never doing anything.”
“I haven’t really tried yet. I might not succeed.”
“You will, because you’ll never give up. I think Carmen was right. Fritz was bluffing with the knife. He wouldn’t have the nerve, even if he knew he could get away with it.”
“Rachel, he pulled a knife on me, on us.”
She shook her head. “It wasn’t as bad as it seemed. I bet there aren’t ten thousand tabs of acid in that van. I’d be surprised if there are a hundred. When Fritz is stoned, he has delusions of grandeur about being a major drug dealer.”
“And Carmen thinks he’s Robin Hood.”
“She has all sorts of ideas about him. More than he has about himself. There’s more to her than you might think. But look at the way they dress. People haven’t dressed like that since I was eight.” She stood. “I need a drink. Let’s have a drink. Do you need a drink? Not beer. Mom and Dad have some cognac, I think.”
I was suddenly shaking and doubted that one drink would stop it. Rachel sat again. “Jesus,” she said beneath her breath. She put her arms around me and her head against my chest. “Your heart is pounding way faster than mine,” she said. Her blouse was damp with sweat.
“What’s a brain toke?” I asked.
“What you really want to know,” Rachel said, “is what brain toke is another name for.”
I nodded sheepishly.
She let go of me and got to her feet. “Why did they have to show up here today?” she said, pacing back and forth. “I can’t believe we’re talking about something just because Fritz brought it up. Brain toke. I haven’t heard anybody use that expression since I was in high school.”
She went to the dining room table, took a little notepad out of her shoulder bag, tore off a sheet and rolled it into the shape of a joint. She pointed to one end. “Imagine that this is lit. To give someone a brain toke, you put the lit end in your mouth and put your face close to someone else’s. They open their mouth and you blow smoke into it while your hands are cupped around the joint. They get high faster. You don’t waste smoke.”
The Mystery of Right and Wrong Page 8