Marlon was wearing a dirty white T-shirt maculated with barbecue sauce, in the tenuous grip of which the great naked ball of his belly hung like a wad of soggy newsprint. He clutched a two-quart plastic bottle of Safeway cola in one hand and held a red helium balloon — HEIFER HIJINKS, WILLITS, CA — in the other. When he saw that my attention was focused on him, his eyes rushed round the thick lenses of his wire-framed glasses and he giggled.
George Pete Turner glared at me out of red-flecked eyes, then took a hit from a pint bottle of Old Grand-Dad. The last time I’d seen him he’d punched me in the side of the head. I looked from him to Sapers and then back again. “They let just about any scum in here, don’t they?” George Pete observed, staring down at my shoes.
“Well,” I said, an easy little chuckle breaking up the mellifluous double ls (who was I to take offense, the whole thing just a harmless little joke, a wisecrack, wit, persiflage, that’s all). I followed this with “Heh-heh” as a sort of bridge, raised my hand in a quick farewell and ducked away, abandoning the beers.
It was at this point, nearly panicked now, running scared, that I found myself making eye contact with the big blonde in the Dale Evans outfit. Though I immediately glanced away, I could see out of the corner of my eye that she was making her way toward me through the crowd. I had nowhere to turn. Sapers behind me, the she-woman in front of me, the pit to my left and the dark portals of Shirelle’s to my right. If in such situations the hearts of heroes expand to enable them to flail their enemies into submission, tuck heroines under their arms and swing to safety via conveniently placed gymnasium ropes, then I benefited at that moment from a similarly expanding organ — that is, my bladder. All at once my body spoke to me with an urgency that was not to be denied. I took a deep breath and plunged toward the shadowy entrance of the bar and the rushing release of the men’s room that lay beyond it.
I was met by the roar of electric fans, a clamor of chaotic voices, and darkness. After the steady, harsh, omnipresent glare of the summer sun, the darkness here seemed absolute, impenetrable, the darkness of mushroom cellars, crypts, spelunkers’ dreams. I edged out of the doorway in the direction of the bar, feeling my way through the pillars of flesh and barking drunken voices until my eyes began to adjust. The place, I saw, was packed. People pressed up against the bar, stood in tight howling groups with cocktails clenched in their hands, sat six or eight to a table tearing at ribs and hoisting pitchers of margaritas. For some reason — temperature control? atmosphere? — the curtains were drawn and candles glimmered from the tables. I stood there a moment, tentative, my shoulders drawn in, a canny old quarterback scouting the defensive line. Then my bladder goaded me and I started across the room.
Unfortunately, a great bleary white-haired hulk of a man in denim jacket and string tie chose that moment to lurch back and deliver the punch line of a joke with a lusty guffaw and an emphatic stamp of his rattlesnake-hide boot. The emphatic stamp caught me across the bridge of my right foot as the jokester’s audience exploded in laughter. “Excuse me,” I murmured, backing off, when I felt a pressure on my arm and swung round to stare bewildered into Savoy’s foxy triangular little face. “Hi,” she said. “Long time no see.”
Something caught in my throat.
“Felix, right?” she said, treating me to a blinding, full-face smile. I felt like a prisoner of painted savages running the gauntlet over a trench of hot coals — reeling from one blow, I pitched face forward into the stinging slap of the next. I watched numbly as she fished a pack of cigarettes from a tiny sequined purse, shook one free and lit it.
“I was just going to the men’s room,” I said.
Savoy breathed smoke in my face. “So how do you like the party?” she said, ignoring me. The smile was fixed on her lips, as empty and artificial as the smile of a president’s wife or a dime-store mannequin, but effective all the same. I didn’t want to be within six miles of her, the pressure on my bladder was like a knife in the groin, I was in trouble, out of luck and I’d begun to feel queasy, and yet still that smile spoke to me of erotic delights unfolding like the petals of a flower. “You’ve got to admit,” she said, pulling the cigarette from her mouth to nudge me and emit a chummy little giggle, “the place is shit-for-sure livelier than usual.”
I had to admit it. But my stomach plunged like an elevator out of control and the ocean of beer I’d consumed was, according to the first law of gastrophysics, seeking an outlet. I belched.
This was hilarious. She clapped her hands and laughed aloud, as if I’d just delivered an epigram worthy of Oscar Wilde. “Far out,” she gasped, still laughing. “I know what you mean.” Then she gave me that beaming, wide-eyed, candid look and took my hand. “Listen,” she said, “I’m over here at the bar. Why don’t you come and join me for a minute so I can buy you a drink and introduce you to a few friends?”
Introduce me? This was the girl who had turned to me with the same smile, the same seductive eyes and insouciant breasts and announced, as if she were giving me an injection, that she had us cold. Everybody in town knows what you guys are doing up there. I pulled away. “No, no,” I said, “I’ve got to go, really,” knowing that she was poison, that she was out to trip me up, that her eyes were trepans and her smile a snare.
“Oh, come on,” she said, tugging my hand as insistently as the big blonde had. “One little drink.”
The flesh is weak, but the mind is weaker. I followed her.
We made our way through the crowd — men in wide-brimmed felt hats, women in print dresses clutching patent-leather purses — to the only unoccupied bar stool in the place. Two women — one middle-aged, the other about thirty — flanked the empty stool like sentinels. They smiled in unison as Savoy led me up to them.
What was going on here? I wondered vaguely, my brain numbed with love for Petra, lust for Savoy, heat, guilt, alcohol and the successive shocks of standing face to face with the handful of people in the world I most wanted to avoid. Why was Savoy, whom I barely knew, taking the trouble of introducing me to anyone? What was in it for her, for me? Was she just a friendly, ingenuous, lovely expansive teenager, or was she a conniving, hardened slut who wanted to lead me to destruction and make me betray my friends? For that matter, what was I doing here? Why wasn’t I in the men’s room, at Petra’s apartment, crouching under the bed at the summer camp?
“This is Felix,” Savoy was saying, “the guy I was telling you about?” Telling them about? The phrase sank talons in my flesh. I saw drinks on the bar — a glass of something clear — the hard foraging eyes of the older woman, the soft inquisitive gaze of the younger. Both women nodded, and I had the queer, lightheaded sensation that the room was moving.
Savoy was watching me. The two women were watching me. I felt like a lion or an elephant at the moment of plunging through the concealed bamboo to the pit below. “This,” Savoy said, indicating the older woman, “is Mrs. Jerpbak, and this,” nodding toward the younger, “is her daughter-in-law, Jeannie.”
At first the names didn’t register. I rarely picked up names on a first introduction, even at the best of times. Mrs. Humpback, Mrs. Runamok: what difference did it make? But then, as the elder woman leaned toward me and mouthed “So what do you do, Felix?” the plugged channels of my brain opened up and the full horror of what was happening came home to me: I was standing amicably in a public place and trading polite chitchat with the wife and mother of my deadliest enemy. Joe McCarthy would as soon have sat down to tea with Ethel Rosenberg and Mao Tse-tung. Even worse, Savoy was obviously intimate with them — no doubt they were old family friends who watched TV and shampooed their dogs together, attended church socials arm-in-arm, observed one another’s birthdays and shared a bottomless revulsion for dope growers, pickpockets and other specimens of urban depravity. This is the guy I was telling you about, Savoy had said. It was all up. We’d been fingered. Ten years, intoned the judge.