"How do these work?" Hoop stood in the door with a blue plastic tray of ice cubes. "There's no arm."
"Twist them, Hoop," Mary said.
"There's no arm," Hoop said again.
"They don't make arms on them anymore," I offered.
Hoop looked at me. "Yeah, I see."
I took it for a slur. "You torque them, Hoop," I said, trying to somehow slur him back.
"Yes, Hoop," Mary said. "Torque you ice trays."
She made the sense I couldn't. She was holding some liquor. She laughed.
Hoop turned and retreated. We heard ice cubes popping loose and hitting the floor.
"Friggin torque is right." Hoop came back and fitted the new cubes into the glass-lined ice bucket. As soon as he settled them in and achieved a tight fit with the lid, Mary held her glass in the air to him, tapping out her cigarette. I started to swivel away from the bar, but she got me by the waistband and tugged me back around.
Hoop hurled the ingredients of another drink toward a fresh glass. He scrubbed the rim with lemon rind. "Always your friggin twist on these," he said again. Mary looked at the ceiling. Ray Conniff was skipping. "Goddamn, Connie," Hoop said suddenly, leaning toward her over the bar. "You don't respect-"
Mary pushed her stool away and saddlebagged herself over the bar, reaching a set of keys which she retrieved in a violent, upward fling. She marched into the kitchen. Hoop said, "She's going to tear a page now, kid."
We heard a roar from the kitchen. In the garage, through a door off the kitchen, we found Mary in a high, boxy, old Mercury, revving its engine with a thoughtful, deliberate expression on her face. We stood next to the car with our drinks, smelling the exhaust. Mary floored carbon out, deafening us. She got out and gallantly held open the door, to me.
"Jesus," Hoop said.
"Don't say a damned word, Hoop." To me: "Get in."
I sat where placed, fingering the large knurled steering wheel of the Mercury. Mary crossed to the rider's side. Hoop attempted our old conspiratorial leer behind her, but it fell and he suddenly yelled, "Go to Florida!"
"Fine," Mary said.
"Friggin Jesus."
Our eyes were stinging.
"I got to get Virginia out of here," Hoop proclaimed. He trailed a V sign into the house. We heard him yell, "Evacuate!"
* * *
Beneath the moldy smell of the Mercury was the smell of a showroom-new car. I eased it out of the garage into heavy rain, which knocked dust off the hood in violent spore bursts, leaving craters of fresh, new color. It looked for a moment as if we were driving on the moon. The car was so high-centered and heavy it felt full of water, full of water and horsepower. I got it up to a speed which brought in some wind, and looked over at Mary-her hair flying about like the photograph in the newspaper she swore wasn't her. I was on a tear, full of gin and with a woman named Drown, and I drove us to a club called the Car Wash, where I knew Ebert to hang out. A naked woman hand-painted on the outside of the club spoke from a cartoon balloon, NO DRINKIN ON PREMISE PLEASE. The artist had given her very large breasts, using, apparently, a house brush that lent them a hairy aspect.
Ebert came forward with a gaping kind of frozen grin on his face: This is so absurd I can't quite laugh and I can't quite ignore it. And we were in an all-black club. "Man!" he said, when nearly to us.
"Man what?" I said.
"I ain't never seen you like this before."
"Like what?"
"On the weekend."
Mary rolled her eyes. She retook my arm, and Ebert turned back toward the bar as if to shepherd us through the quieted crowd. The noise slowly resumed, and we went to the bar.
Ebert was not sober. "Man," he kept saying, "you a trip."
Mary whipped a little flask of gin out and asked the barman if it was all right.
"She a trip, too," Ebert said. His eyes were brilliant and looking over my head, as if he was checking the horizon. Mary had the barman pouring her a drink from her flask, which he put away for her. They had no tonic, so she took a 7-Up and the first hit made her wince.
She winked at Ebert. "My main man, Ebert," I said to her, indicating him with a thumb. The jive felt very artificial and I decided to cut it out. Ebert and I were better friends when we couldn't manage to shake hands.
"You a trip," Ebert said again. "Never seen you like this."
He was still studying things afar, eyes wet. Watching him, I lost some time. I suddenly noticed Mary at the pool tables. She selected a cue and stood, hip out, chalking it.
"Ebert," I said, "do you have loose teeth?"
"Naw, man," he said.
He didn't want to know why I would ask him something like that. I could not have told him. Something about his dreaming, teary gaze suggested old men without teeth, and I thought I saw him clenching his jaw as if moving his teeth.
"Your teeth are tight?"
"They tight. They loose, too."
Mary had gotten into a game.
I motioned with three fingers and pointed to Ebert, myself, and Mary, and the barman gave a quick nod upward and filled the order. He carried Mary's fresh gin and 7-Up to her and she gave me a theatrical scowl. Ebert put his head down onto the rim of his glass, and when he raised it he had a dark ring imprinted on his forehead. "Never seen you like this."
He was drunker than I cared to see him as our escort. I gave Mary a little let's-get-going sign. She had made friends by amazing all the dudes anywhere near the table. A guy came up to me. "You carry her back sometime."
We drove home. The Mercury felt like two or three boulders.
In bed I had the spins. I started deep breathing to burn up some alcohol before throwing some up, and got a saliva run.
"Put your foot on the floor," Mary said.
"It's on the floor," I said. "I know about that."
"You know a lot," she said. I couldn't tell if she was mocking.
"What do you call the bedspins?" I asked.
"The whirlies." I had thought maybe she had an exotic name from her own generation. She reached over and felt my forehead then, as if to say she had not meant to sound sarcastic if she had. I lay there spinning, thinking: She maybe thinks I know things, and maybe knows I don't.
So that is how I find myself sitting at this wire-mesh table in the mornings, taking hangover notes, reflex motions of a would-have-been scientist. Since that first day three weeks ago we've not had anything so spectacular as the drop-in. Hoop and Virginia's visit established several data points:
1. Sam, or Stump, is presumably dead, and that is the extent of my privileged knowledge.
2. He may have had something to do with Florida, where it is, as if in obeisance to Hoop's outbursts, somehow tacitly assumed we may go, so long as it-the going-does not obtain an urgency. There is a sense in which we are packing our things psychologically, and when the moment is right, but not demanding or in any way special, we will take off and simply be there as unprepared and innocent as we were that night in the Car Wash.
3. The no-bio rule is a constant of this universe. You follow it if you want to operate. What I know of Stump and Mary is largely known, and she is indifferent, as she says, to any bio song and dance out of me.
* * *
Mary is moving through rich banks of azalea, her head alone above the creamy reds, nickel arc of cold water lobbing heavily all around her. I have begun reading her old acting scripts. They turn up everywhere-in Stump's clothes, under table legs-and they all seem to have been handled roughly. I have not found one yet with its cover intact.
I don't know plays beyond the forced college stuff, and I've never seen anything like these things. In every one there is a role made for Mary. I found this in a script under Virginia's daybed-cover gone, as usual-and was stupid enough to ask Mary the title. "I forgot," she said.