The streets were almost instantly cooler as the dark fell. The wind was starting up as it always seemed to do at this hour, raising clouds of dust and making things rattle. Mrs. Houston was trudging forward, head down, a handkerchief held over her mouth, and she nearly ran into Jeanine Phillips by the mailbox because she hadn’t seen Jeanine there as she approached. Oh spare me, Mrs. Houston thought. Jeanine was carrying that big heavy blue religious book beneath her arm. “I was going to leave you a note,” Jeanine said. She removed her hand from Mrs. Houston’s mailbox.
“You’re after my check,” Mrs. Houston said. “You’re just after my check.”
Jeanine looked very pert this evening — something like a nurse. She wore a white raincoat, and she’d had her blond hair cut off short. “I wasn’t doing anything,” she insisted.
“My money’s in the bank,” Mrs. Houston told her.
“Can I come in and talk to you for a while? I need to talk to you about Burris.”
“Won’t do Burris no harm to go without his dope for one day,” Mrs. Houston said.
They stood in the wind for a moment, wordless.
“Some people,” Jeanine began, “their material existence is very painful for them. I know I get too crazy over Burris and I forget what the priority should be, I mean, we should help him to make it to the next highest plane, Mrs. Houston — the morontia life.”
Mrs. Houston felt the air move through her as if she were made of gauze, and she shut her eyes. The tangled gnostic catechism of her youngest son’s girlfriend always made her dizzy. “You tell Burris this that I’m telling you right now: my money won’t buy him nothing but more suffering. He’s got to learn — why”—she was suddenly overcome with passion—”this is a beautiful world! Joy is our chief purpose—”
“The thing is,” Jeanine interrupted. “Mrs. Houston, the thing is he can’t eat, he can’t sleep, he can’t receive the imprint of his Thought Adjuster. Every one of us has a Thought Adjuster kind of like assigned to you. And when you’re asleep — oh, I don’t know how it works. He needs to sleep. Burris needs to sleep. He can’t sleep.”
“Tell him what he needs is to get down on the floor of his misery and pray.”
Jeanine let out an ugly sob that was almost like the bark of a dog. “He’ll never pray!” She was standing there in the yard, carrying the big book of nonsense by which she pretended to live.
Behind her, the house was dark. Mrs. Houston tasted the dust and salt on her own lips. “Well,” she said, “you want some lemonade? And I got chocolate milk, if you want that instead.”
“Thank you,” Jeanine said.
“But there ain’t no money for Burris’s dope. Just lemonade or chocolate milk, and that’s the whole of it.” She led the way inside.
Jeanine left before eleven. Another twenty dollars gone into nothing — and why? Because I love my son. I feel just the same this instant as when I held him in my arms and he was my baby. I was forty-five years old… She moved about the house dusting things with her handkerchief. For years she’d been an habituée of the nighttime talk shows, but since Christmas she’d been without TV — hers had been stolen on December 24. She didn’t like to let herself think that Burris had stolen it — but who else could it have been?
Leaving the kitchen light on, she retired to her bed in the back room with her Bible. Sometimes she felt very confused to look up from the Old Testament and see her electric Timex on the chest of drawers, and then think of the world with its radar, its microwaves, the Valley Communications Building made entirely out of glass.
She let the Bible lie on her stomach and fell asleep with the light on. She dreamed of a man being shot to death.
It was Sunday.
James Houston leaned his head from the truck’s passenger window and spat out saliva brought into his mouth by intense nausea. Ford Williams was driving, and Dwight: Snow sat between them holding his clipboard on his lap.
“What’s your problem there?” Ford asked, shouting above the wind of their passage. He steered with one hand, rubbing his eyes and exhibiting signs of nervousness with the other.
“I do not know, my friend,” James said. “I think I put some shit in my body last night that my body don’t like.” There was a beer bottle shoved into the ruptured paneling of the door to keep it still, and some kind of artificial flower sprouted from the bottle’s mouth. “Shit my body hates, in fact.” He plucked the flower and smelled it, and threw it out the window. Dwight Snow said, “Hey,” and then lit a cigaret.
James said a few more words nobody could hear, because his face was out the window.
They moved at seventy miles an hour into a steadily intensifying landscape. It was quarter to seven, an hour of the morning presided over by one half of a perfectly flat and orange vicious sun. Cactuses standing knee-high in the desert threw shadows fifty feet long. For dozens of miles around them, every surface was either purple or blinding. Behind and southeast of them lay Phoenix like a dream materializing out of smog. “Well,” Ford Williams announced, “they say fried foods angry up the blood.”
“That got something to do with something?” James asked. He could scarcely hear himself, with the wind and the rattling.
“Man, it ain’t even seven AM in the fucking morning,” Ford said, “so don’t ask me.”
“Just trying to keep track of whatever. I mean like whether we’re having a real conversation or whether we’re just having seven AM,” James said.
Ford said, “I’m just starting to believe in this highway. Two three minutes, I’ll be all of half awake.” He turned his head and shouted “Coffee!” in Dwight Snow’s ear. Dwight failed even to blink, drawing on his cigaret and looking straight into the highway’s approach through opaque eyes that were something like a lizard’s.
In a minute Dwight consulted the vehicle titles on his clipboard. “We’re talking about exit fourteen,” he said.
“Is that all it says?” James spat out the window again. “I like all that detail there. How we supposed to find it?”
“It’s right on the road. We’re talking about two motorcycles, one red Cadillac, one powder blue BMW sportscar. When we find them, there we are.”
“About four miles. I’m talking about exit fourteen,” Ford said.
“All that stuff supposed to go? Moto-sickles and the whole etcetera?” James asked.
“This person is a chronic overextender of his limits, huh?” Ford asked.
“Two motorcycles. One Cadillac. One BMW,” Dwight repeated.
“Guy’s got his own personal national debt or something,” Ford said.
“We take all his shit, how’s he going to get to the store for water?” James asked.
“Probably got ten other cars,” Ford said. “Financed by various other outfits.”
Dwight made marks on the titles with his pen as if engaged in actual business, but there was no reason whatever to mark on the titles. “Let’s be thinking about how we’re going to get it all,” he said.
“I say we just confront him at gunpoint, and keep him absolutely still while we go after our God-appointed mission taking things,” Ford said. “Like walk right in his back door.”
Dwight sighed loudly enough to be heard even with the wind and the pickup’s noise.
“Well it ain’t like we can just sneak all that stuff away from him,” Ford said. “Please be reasonable.”