“Well, tell me this,” Ralph said. “Is it true you balled Nancy Ryan last night?”
Joe tried not to blanch. “Where did you hear that?”
“Iréné Papadraxis called Natalie Gandolf last night to explain that they might be held up on account of a flat tire in the Holland Tunnel. Skipper and Natalie are throwing that pre-unveiling bash at their mansion Wednesday night, remember? So Iréné wanted to warn them it might have to be postponed. Natalie had a conniption and couldn’t find any Valium. So she called Marilyn Tibby up at five A.M. to see if she had any, and spilled the whole story. Gypsy Girl and I just happened to be over at Marilyn’s.”
“I still don’t see where Nancy and me come in.”
“Iréné told Natalie, who told Marilyn, that apparently when Rama Unfug called Nancy to get bail money, a mouthpiece, and a piece of medical script for Baba Ram Bang’s insulin, you answered the telephone at her place.”
“I don’t believe it! I’m a goner.”
“There’s more if you can take it.”
“I can’t, but you better tell me anyway.”
“Okay. Soon as Natalie heard, and while she was flailing around trying to turn up a Valium, she decided she had better call Scott Harrison and ask his opinion on what sort of advice, re legal moves, she ought to call back to Iréné, or Rama, or Wilkerson, or whoever’s personning the fort back there.”
“Whoever’s whatening the fort?”
“Please. Scott got pissed because it’s five A.M. and he was shacked up with Suki Terrell: apparently she had a tiff with Randall at the Hanuman Follies last night and decided to ask Scott to teach her how to be a ULC nun. He told Natalie to call Nancy and ask the Simian Foundation to find somebody else to do their dirty work. So Natalie blurted to Scott that she didn’t really want to call Nancy back because apparently she was having a blast shacked up with you.”
“You’re joking. You’re a sadist telling me lies just for the hell of it.”
“Wish I was, old boy. But Marilyn got a call ten minutes later from Suki Terrell, asking was it true that you and Nancy Ryan were doing a number.”
“And Marilyn replied?”
“She says she told Suki to call Nancy and ask her.”
“Suki didn’t call Nancy,” Joe groaned. “Not while I was there.”
“No. But apparently Natalie called Tribby, to see if he would give any advice. So Tribby called a number in New York that I guess Iréné had given and he spoke with Rama Unfug. During their conversation, Rama happened to ask if you and Heidi had gotten a divorce. He was curious, you know, having heard on the grapevine that you guys might be his new neighbors. Naturally, when Tribby said ‘No, why?’ Rama told him that when he had called Nancy at five A.M., you had answered the telephone. So right away Tribby called me at Marilyn’s and asked was the dope deal off or what? Then he explained to me that you were playing footsie with Nancy Ryan when you should have been entertaining your friend Peter Roth and five pounds of cocaine.”
Morosely, Joe said, “I don’t believe this is happening to me.”
“Well, at least you nailed her. That’s always fun.”
“I didn’t ‘nail’ her, Ralph. It was a nice experience,” he lied, swamped with guilt and no doubt blushing crimson. “I actually enjoyed it.”
“Okay. Congratulations.”
“Screw your hosannas. I feel lousy. I never cheated on Heidi before. I wanted to plenty of times, but I never did.”
“It’s no big deal. The world doesn’t explode.”
“A lot you know.”
“Look around you, dummy. Has the plaza been reduced to rubble? Are all the plate-glass windows shattered? Is Darlene nursing a couple of shiners and bleeding from the nostrils?”
“Thanks for the sympathy.”
“Hey, it’s not a big thing. Happens all the time.”
“I don’t care. I feel creepy.”
Ralph tapped his shoulder good-naturedly. “Easy, amigo. You’re not the first person who ever copped a little nookie out of season.”
“I didn’t ‘cop a little nookie,’ man. I happened to ball a very nice person, and—”
“What are you trying to say—you’re in love with another broad?”
Joe said, “Why don’t you refine the language a little? You make it sound so tawdry. Nancy isn’t a ‘broad.’ She happens to be a very decent and complex human being, who is also sensational in bed.”
“Bueno. So what?”
“This sort of transgression isn’t my style. I don’t want to cheat on Heidi. It feels so improper and … weird.”
“Joe, in 1955, if you committed adultery, you might have had a problem. In this day and age, if you don’t bag a few cunts on the sly, people will start thinking you’re a faggot.”
“I really wish you wouldn’t use words like ‘cunt’ and ‘faggot.’”
As Darlene placed Joe’s breakfast on the table, Ralph addressed her: “Darlene, I’d like you to meet my friend here, Joseph Miniver, three-time winner of the Mr. Puritan Universe contest.”
Joe threw up his hands. Darlene said, “Don’t pay any attention to him, Joe, he’s a wise guy. And a cynic. He writes pornography.”
“What am I supposed to do,” Ralph complained, “canonize him for falling from his state of original grace and yet remaining sensitive, compassionate, and concerned about the people involved who are going to be the victims of a terrible tragedy because he had the chance to slip somebody a stiff one and took it?”
Joe sliced open his egg, cut out a piece of it, forked off a chunk of sausage, arranged the egg and the sausage on a corner of his toast, and bit off the corner. Knocking it down with a slug of orange juice and a sip of Sanka, he moaned, “I’m dead. I blew it. What a shlemozzl.”
“Relax. Just lie to her. Tell her you spent the night with me. I’ll corroborate your story. We got to drinking and talking about literature up in my office after the bar closed. You got stewed and passed out.”
“Didn’t you just finish telling me that everybody from Natalie Gandolf and Scott Harrison to Suki Terrell and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir were informed by telephone, last night, of my whereabouts?”
Ralph said, “Listen to this: ‘A melon farmer in Wyatt Earp, Missouri—’”
“Wyatt Earp, Missouri?”
“That’s what it says here … ‘paid his taxes to the IRS by tattooing his check on one of his own watermelons.’ The IRS sent the melon to this guy’s bank, and the bank cashed it. Know how they then canceled it?”
“I’m talking to you about possibly the biggest crisis of my life, and you have the audacity to start reading me stories about some kook—”
“They ate it.”
“You’re a big help. Thanks a lot, man.”
“Here’s another one. Dateline Maple City, New Hampshire. ‘Local fish-and-game authorities recently arrested a woman named Ethel Sturgeon for killing a deer out of season. Mrs. Sturgeon said it wasn’t her fault. She said she was sitting in her breakfast nook feeding the baby when an eight-point buck walked through the open front door. She was frightened for the child’s safety.…’ Says here the kid’s name was Myron, age two. So she killed the buck. You know how?”
“You’re an ugly human being. You really are.”
“She beat the animal to death with a toilet plunger.”
“You’re lying.”
“Read it for yourself. Says right here.”
“I’ll see you, pal.”
“Twelve o’clock at the airport, right?”
Joe fished a sawbuck out of his front pocket, and dropped it on the table for Darlene as he addressed his hardhearted buddy: “Hope you enjoy the paper, knowing that Heidi is probably beating me to death with a toilet plunger, a scene you could have avoided by lending a slightly more sympathetic ear.”
“‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be,’” Ralph advised, dismissing his good friend by burrowing ever deeper into the Sunday newspaper. Rimpoche was still snuffling in his shaggy fur, nipping w
ee bugs.
As he plummeted out the jangling door, Darlene called, “Congratulations on your new relationship, Joe!”
Spinning to give her the finger, Joe didn’t see the approach of Jeff Orbison—they collided. “Hey,” Jeff said. “Where’s the fire, man?” Sweat glistened on his dissipated plump face. He was wearing a yellow warm-up suit and mandarin-orange Adidas. A beaded headband kept his hair in place. His breath could have blown open a vault.
“No fire, Jeff. Life is a bowl of cherries.”
“Say,” the singer said. “What’s this I hear about a gang of thieves that hijacked the Hanuman statue in New York, took Baba Ram Bang hostage, and shot Shanti Unfug in the chest during their escape?”
“What do I look like, the Simian Foundation’s press secretary?”
“You were shacked up with Nancy Ryan when the call came through last night, weren’t you?”
“Aw, do me a favor.…” Joe staggered down the sidewalk and swung into his bus.
Jeff said, “Wait a sec. I gotta talk to you.”
Joe put the key in the ignition, and sat there, staring dully forward, wondering if he should commit suicide. Or, when he turned the key, would Ray Verboten’s auto-bomb expert have done it for him?
“Speaking of Ray Verboten,” Jeff said. “The word’s out he’s looking for you.”
“I can’t imagine why.”
“They say you’ve got a shipment of smack coming in, and that you’re planning to infringe on his market.”
“It isn’t smack, it’s cocaine, Jeffrey. And it has nothing to do with Ray Verboten. Believe me, he’s welcome to the territory.”
“I’ll be your bodyguard,” Jeff said. “For two hundred a week. I’ve got a .357 magnum, and that ain’t a Ping-Pong paddle. For an extra hundred a week I’ll bring in Tom Yard: he’s got a police .38. He actually used to be a cop up in Ouray, Colorado, before they caught him stealing the department’s stash of confiscated Mary Jane.”
“Thanks, but I think I can handle it.” Joe felt dizzy.
“You okay? You look a little green.”
“I feel a little green.”
“Listen, I got just the thing for the mean old greenies in my car. You ever done cutworm moths?”
“Cutworm moths?”
“Sure, it’s the latest. They pioneered it up at the Milky Way. They put all these cutworm moths in a box with a mixture of STP, PCP, and vitamin C in powder form. Those moths’ll eat anything and apparently they really lap that stuff up. You gotta watch ’em close, though, because they don’t live too long after they scarf the goodies, and you have to nosh them within ten minutes after they croak. In that time their chemistry does something special to the shit, and the rush that hits you is like taking off from Cape Kennedy for Lunar City.”
“Thanks, but no thanks.”
“Suit yourself. It’s your funeral.”
One deep breath later, Joe twisted the key. He elicited a glare from the dashboard’s red and green lights, but only a click! from the starter. Cursing softly, he climbed into the back seat for his tools, then crawled underneath the bus and touched pliers handles to wire-connection points on the solenoid attached to the starter. Something gave a fluttering clack! in there, and dirt fell in his eye. He snarled and spent five minutes trying to knuckle away the pain.
Ralph’s feet and Rimpoche’s paws appeared at the edge of his car: “Everything all right under there?” Ralph queried imperiously.
“No thanks to you.”
“Well, I’m going home. I need a float. You got me all tense in there.”
“Bon voyage, bunghole.”
But he had forgotten his change. Making a Dracula face as he cackled “the Master of the False Exit strikes again!,” Joe slumped ashamedly back into the Prince of Whales and took—without a word—the seven dollars Darlene offered.
“What happened to your eye, Joe—you got punched?”
Ignoring her, he headed for the door.
“One other thing,” she called after him.
Joe stopped in his tracks, but didn’t turn around. Instead, he hunched up his shoulders and grimaced, like a man expecting an arrow to tunk between his shoulder blades.
“Tribby Gordon just called, looking for you. He says it’s urgent you get back right away.”
“Did he say what about?”
“He said he heard that your friend was on the Trailways bus last night when it was hijacked and dumped into the Rio Grande with all passengers aboard. He wanted to know if your friend was really in the intensive-care ward at the Our Lady of the Sorrows Hospital undergoing surgery to replace a severed hand.”
“Ha ha, Darlene. You’re a million laughs.”
“He was serious!”
The door banged behind him. For some strange reason—his psychic powers were functioning—Joe thought to check under the vehicle’s right rear wheel, and sure enough, his abandoned pliers lay there. With a stifled growl, he snatched them up.
Shifting gingerly, depressing and releasing the clutch with delicate finesse (his throw-out bearing was almost gone), Joe muttered, “The light forces of Innocence and Righteousness triumph over the dark forces of Devious Technology yet once again,” and steered his car out of the plaza, heading west.
“Oh damn!”
He had left his papers in the café. But on second thought, the oversight was probably a blessing in disguise. For no doubt the headlines he’d been too preoccupied to check out declared:
CHAMISAVILLE DRUG FIEND RAPES HANUMAN GROUPIE! STATEWIDE MANHUNT PROCLAIMED!
* * *
THOUGH A Chamisaville resident for only three years, the changes Joe had observed along Route 240 during his brief sojourn were stunning. A new house went up every day. Back when electricity entered the Pueblo and construction began on Joseph Bonatelli’s dog-racing track and Ya-Ta-Hey Hotel complex, land in Chamisaville had been going for two thousand an acre. Now it had skyrocketed to nine, ten, sometimes fifteen grand an acre, with no end in sight. New houses, built exclusively by valley newcomers, inevitably combined the ridiculous and the sublime.
Old-style adobes, favored by Spanish-speaking valley denizens, had been solid, flat-roofed, one-story dwellings, so simple they seemed logical extensions of the earth. Unobtrusive, beautiful, and architecturally similar, for centuries their unpretentious sameness had added to the valley’s feeling of community. In contrast, the new houses were explosions of individual expression gone awry. Every house was unique, an extension (call it a flaunting) of its owner’s implacable ego. The design idiosyncrasies of each dwelling slobbered all over themselves. If fabricated of adobe, that mud was sculpted in Gaudiesque driblets. Ramparts, scaffolds, and turrets abounded. At every turn were corbels and arches and cantilevered patios, pyramids and towers ad infinitum. Enormous picture windows framed cinemascopic and panavistic views of Hija Negrita, the sacred mountain. Greenhouses proliferated like rabbits fed a diet of oysters and ginseng; banks of solar collectors reached toward the blistering sky. Bubble skylights let light stream into bathrooms where tubs were sunk into terrariums of banana trees, goo-goo vines, and pot plants. Two- and three-story frame houses shot toward the heavens like skyscraperitos, their flanks paneled with redwood, their roofs sheathed in Mediterranean-orange terra-cotta. Sky-lit and glass-sided studios seemed to stand on stems no sturdier than those supporting crystal champagne glasses. Behind beautiful stained-glass windows, you could see endless arrays of gourd-shaped flowerpots clutched in the folds of elaborate macrame Oriole nests. No staircase ever proceeded from point A to point B in a straight line: each one spiraled upward from the living room to the sleeping loft, or zigzagged from behind the organic banco in the sunken kitchen up to the second floor, from which a ladder rose to the staggered third floor, all the rooms modularly disposed to create separate but attached living quarters (guard that privacy, folks!), much like the nesting habits of paraplegic baboons.
In some of the old valley houses, residents had decorated their ceilings with splintered
cedar or aspen branches, known as latias, lodged in a herringbone pattern. More often they had simply laid boards across their viga rafters and heaped on the dirt and tar paper. But in the new houses, craftspeople went berserk with latias, graduating from herringbone patterns to complex hexoglyphic designs of positively gaga spiritual significance. The old houses had been heated by wood, or by cheap butane heaters. In the new houses, solar technology ran rampant. Fireplaces were sculpted with Daliesque wit and intricacy, so crammed with nichos, and so inlaid with colorful stones and tiles (and hung with corn or chile ristras), that they resembled space-capsule cones in which mere burning logs would have seemed trite, if not downright nonsensical. Others installed superexpensive electric heating to go with their 26-inch color-perfect cableized TV consoles. A few people bought up old radiators in Colorado resort-hotel auctions, installing them in their modern houses. Daily, trucks, piloted by enterprising ex-advertising consultants, left Chamisaville to scour the Southwest, buying up collapsing old barns for a song, tearing them apart, and trucking them back home, where, as highly prized paneling—oh, that weathered look!—they could bring as much as sixty cents a board-foot, nearly three times the going price of finished lumber.
Steam rising from countless hot tubs seemed like emissions from myriad chubby little factories. There were swimming pools, too, and saunas, and Jacuzzis. And several dozen private tennis and paddle-ball courts.
Joe himself had dreams of doing his own house in some elaborate, farfetched style that was a “uniquely viable habitat” to go with the “aesthetic living” demands of himself, Heidi, Michael, and Heather. Yet occasionally, right in the middle of a reverie about pyramids, hexagons, A-frames, domettes, U-curves, rounded or mansard windows, sunken tubs and saunas, his balloon would suddenly pop, making him feel like a fool. Then he’d sit down and draw a one-story L-shaped house, such as they had been building for centuries in the valley before the newcomers arrived and instituted their architectural carnival.