Made to Break (11 page)

Directly after our conversation that early April afternoon, I walked into the sun to contemplate whether Basil had found any pleasure in his despair. Because now and then, I've heard it said, it's in despair we find our deepest joy, and more so yet when we see the hopelessness of our state. But who's to say? None of us really knows that much.

That night in the rain nearly four days had passed since Basil had slept. The meth was at best a ghost in his veins, and he'd been heavily drinking. Going underground was not an option. He may've been wretched, but he wasn't a mouse. And yet neither was he any longer the man he'd been, if ever he was that man. He didn't know who he was anymore, or what. He knew only that once upon a time he'd scoffed at the delay of action, because delay implied thought and thought, in short, was for pussies. And this for Basil was so. He'd never measured the cost of his deeds—what might happen should he bash this nose or snap that arm, say, or ingest this drug, or bang that drunken
lass. Never once had he agonized before probable litigation, damage to the brain, unwieldy prophylactics. All these things Basil would do in a flash, especially if the man was blocking his yen, or the drug could bring him up or down, or the lass was there for the taking. Because Basil too had adopted The Cry of Twentieth-Century Solipsism, come straight from the mouth of his sometime-significant other.
Hang the cost!
he'd shout, and leap into the fray. Never once, in truth, had Basil considered even the
notion
of consequences, not, at least, insofar as that thinking concerned the philosophies of action and reaction, how in his moments of resolution he, Basil, functioned merely as a catalyst for the further realization of as-yet suppressed events.

And so he was trapped in this limbo of grey. He could stay where he was, he thought, and maybe, though more probably, die—a not unattractive notion on the chance we buddies viewed his death as martyrdom—or chase after Super, or return to the cabin to plan new modes of breaking away. But the deeper his reflection, the greater his fear. He couldn't free his feet, much less reach them to touch. He'd grown too stiff, for that matter, even to touch his knees. That was when the panic engulfed him, he said, that was when he fell. So brightly excruciating was his pain that at first he thought it rapture, though it wasn't, of course, or anything distantly like it. Pain pure and simple had struck him, such terribly horrifically appalling pain that the cry he let out could as easily have been heard as rhapsody than ecumenical howl. He pulled his dogs clear of both boots and mud and curled up like a question mark in tears, wanting nothing then but oblivion, or some place instead with quiet and warmth, and a beautiful girl, and booze…

BOOZE. BOURBON TEA. GIRLS…

The girls had gone to make bourbon tea, and Basil had left with Super. The door swung open, the door clunked shut. All lay in silence, they were gone.

But then I heard voices, and then a frisky tune, both jovial and odd, bopping to lyrics odder still.

When my baby makes love to me
, the woman sang,
it's murder
.

Dinky lay on the bed, mumbling against this scene, which by now had become a cinema of useless torture. Nor could I shake free of his mantra. Like evil vines, it had grown purchase in my head:
Dinky's sick, he must die—Lard, have mercy on us!

The man didn't even seem real anymore. Or maybe he was realer than I could take. I held his hand. I stroked his head. His face felt clammy and hot. Above us, the clown looked content as a louse on a kid, staring with that sinister smile, its carnation, withered and doomed, the fucking thing. To hear the timpani of his heart I lay my head on Dinky's chest, but in my ears sang scratching claws. If in that moment a single word could've peeled away all the pretense and falsity behind which our lives had till then squirmed, I would've said that word, and said that word, and said that word again.

When my baby makes love to me, it's murder
.

The night itself had become a lamentation, the dawn, trudging
our way, its unshed tear. I wanted so badly to make up for all I'd done and been. But first I had to make myself, whoever that was, happy, whole, something. How I was to accomplish that, though, redeem myself, when that redemption hinged on so many needs, some impossible giving away of self, only doom could say. When my life amounted to a spoil of fits and starts? When I myself was a fake, if that, endlessly tangled in my web of fear?

I dropped into a chair and let it fade…

Down a slope of brush I tumbled, into a wasted canyon. A host of women rose from the banks of some dead river, their hair, like queens', in chignons pierced by sticks. They had elongated waists and statuary thighs, and their faces were veiled as in some ritualized state of mourning. Bangles and bands and bracelets of steel adorned their arms and wrists. I'd never seen something at once so beautiful and inert, postures, it seemed, intended as much to seduce as repel. I was negotiated through these idols like some apathetic hero, never touching them or land. I didn't speak to them, either, nor did I hear them speak. They were cold, these women, queer, and yet somehow I knew they'd gathered to keep me safe. And then a mouth opened up, the canyon was ending, and I hovered at the breach while a woman's voice sounded in my ear, just a word:
Keys
… I was vomited toward a lifeless plain. Among the rubble of some great alluvial fan I lay until with horror I saw that what had looked from above to be a knoll of rock and wood was in truth a mound of bones. I began to laugh. And when my laughter was exhausted, I fell into a swoon…

I rose to a world of verdure and flesh, maidens in a spring. A breeze caressed me. Birds in shadow sang. I was the voyeur in hiding. I smelled the smell of imminent love. They were angels to the last, each with Hickory's eyes, Hickory's nose, Hickory's
mouth of red. But soon the green had melted, and I was made a blur. Murder was a sweet and death the moon. Knowledge entered: I had been so blessed…

Gesundheit!

Dinky had been sneezing. He lay propped against the wall, Hickory beside him with a mug of steam across whose side were the words,
Don't Worry, Be Happy!
She must've just come in. On the stool to my side sat a mug of my own. My eyes I kept nearly closed.

“The sleep's done you good,” Hickory said.

She'd gathered her hair in a bun and stuck it through with a pen. The tattoo of a skeleton key on the back of her neck whispered in my ear.
I don't know where the lock is now. Do you?
Her face was graceful, quietly sad. It darkened for a time, then the corner of her mouth lifted to a faint encouraging smile.

“Drink this,” she said.

“What time is it?” Dinky said, and spat into a rag.

“You know I don't own a watch.”

“I want to see how long till sunrise.”

Hickory shook her head. “The sun will rise, Dinky. You know that.” She dabbed at his nose with a tissue. “Drink this.”

“It's all bees now,” Dinky said.

Hickory paused, as though digging deep for a clever word. She looked sheepish. “The I'll-be-damned kind or the I'll-be-a-son-of-a-guns?”

“In my head I mean.”

“Drink.”

“I mean it's not fires any more. Just bees.”

Hickory drew back the curtain. She leaned into the window till steam fanned out before her. “Pretty soon,” she said, “Basil and that old man will be back with the truck.”

“I want to ask you a favor.”

Her smile was pretense now for sure. And her voice sounded weaker, the skin on her face was tight. Anyone could see she'd grown thin on all the faking.

“Just so long,” she said, “as it doesn't involve taking off my clothes.”

“Your name. Hickory, I mean. It's not you.”

“Someone here's forgetting that someone else made it up.”

“I mean, I was wondering, you know, if you'd mind if maybe I called you by your real name.”

“I don't care what you call me. You know that, too.”

“Mira then. How about I call you Mira.”

“Anything you want, Dinky.”

After a time my pal sipped from his mug and said, “I saw you dancing. Tonight, when Super brought us back.” Hickory smiled. “I told Andrew you moved like smoke.”

“Maybe we can go some time,” she said. “The five of us together, when we get out of here?”

“Maybe.”

“Dinky.”

“Leave me alone now. Can you do that for me?”

“You know that's not what you want.”

“I'm really, really tired,” said Dinky, crying now.

“No, Dinky,” she said, “I won't.”

THE MUG BESIDE ME SMELLED OF WHISKEY AND something else, some kind of flower, it seemed. White string dangled from its side. Hickory, I figured, had got resourceful. I cleared my throat.

“I made you some tea, too,” Hickory said.

“It tastes like ca-ca,” Dinky said, so strange, his face still wet with tears.

“That,” Hickory said, “was supposed to be a surprise.”

I forced a yawn and then a smile, and took the teabag from my mug. On the end of the string was something like a bandage. “What the hell?”

Hickory's mouth was a tight blue heart. “It's my secret brew.”

“Jesus,” Dinky said.

“If you really want to know,” Hickory said, “it comes from a jam jar.”

“A jam jar.”

“Like the thing that keeps what you put on your toast?”

I looked again at the so-called teabag. “No toast I've ever had.”

“Yeah?”

I studied the thing. The image of a jam jar with a big fly's wings bumped through my head. Then I remembered it, that scene from a few years back, with Lucille.

“Is this what I think it is?”

“You can think it's whatever you want, but it came from a jam jar.”

“We've been everywhere there is to go,” Dinky said, “and everywhere we've been that's called a tampon.”

Hickory meanwhile had kept her mouth tight in that little heart. Now she narrowed her eyes.

“Like I said,
it's from a jam jar
.”

So far as I knew, no one had told Hickory the infamous story of Roper and Lucille. She must've just heard it, from Lucille herself, I guessed, probably while they were brewing this toxic grog.

I'd just come in from a long night of raves south of Market. My pal Bruno and I had hooked up with a pal of his, a shrimp of a cat named Andre. The kid was black as a raven, with a hoop through his septum and bleach his fro—a stripe front to back—and an Angel Flight suit, white, propped by a polyester shirt of midnight black, and gold enough round his neck to've drained Fort Knox. He was the slickest dealer I'd ever met.

But before that even, Bruno and I had dropped a few tabs of X and hit the floor to mix it with the ladies. Three spicy Filipinas caught us gawking and slithered over post-haste, wriggles and tits and laughter. We zoomed in on two and left the third to share till someone else appeared. This went on for who-knows-how-long, ten or fifteen, or forty-five or fifty. What I can say for sure is how once Bruno's chick began to outdo mine, I weaseled my way between them. And by God if it wasn't five minutes more that the girl had grown eight arms, a hand on my chest, a hand in my hair, another on my Jean Jeudi.

“Your cock,” she said, “I want it so bad in my mouth.”

So that's how it was going to play. I'd give the she-devil what she wanted, all right, but first she needed some good old-fashioned romance. We went on with the dancing and kissing,
the girl chanting in my ear the whole damned time, great godly filthy things, working herself up, I could see, into a frenzy. It was only after I'd run my hands across her rack a few hundred times that it struck me things were out of joint. Where, for crying out loud, was all the T&A? And then like a nightmare born I realized this goon had no more cleavage than the side of a train. In a panic I ran my fingers through her hair—a freaking wig, no doubt, coarse as a mop. Still, I had to be sure, and the only way to accomplish that was to stroll through the sanctum sanctorum. The X by then had me like a blight. Half of me didn't give a flying rat's ass what this thing was—part man, part woman, a little bit of beast—the other half swam with horror and rage. I spent a few minutes working up my nerve while whatever it was tried to swab my ear clean with its fruity tongue.

“Oh, sugar,” it whispered, “I'm so wet down there, so wet for you.”

At last my hand found its way into the drop zone, but—aarrrggghhh!—there in the cleft of a tight little buttocks lay a package bigger than my own. It was true, for sunshine's sake, I'd been played like a Mississippi catfish! My furious little fiend had herself a furious little appetite, yes indeed, and time was moving on. For the tiniest instant, I thought,
Hell, maybe I should just go along with this little snowqueen
. After everything else I'd done to get in this spot, it seemed I deserved whatever came my way. And if that weren't a death blow, I looked around to find me ditched by Bruno. I was on the verge of losing my bird when from out of the crowd stepped Alex, my friend from down-unda, purveyor of smart drugs extraordinaire.