“Next thing you know,” he said, “we’ll be eating each other for breakfast like the losers in the Donner Party.” He dug his fingers into Lucille’s ass and lurched at her with fangs. “My oh my how these buttocks are sweet,” he said. “Fingergoddamnedlickinggood they are, oh my, oh my.”
“That’s not funny,” Hickory said.
“This isn’t funny?”
“What you said. It wasn’t funny.”
“But her ass does taste good.” Basil held a hand over Lucille’s butt. “See for yourself.”
“It’s just not funny, talking about our predicament that way. Even as a joke.”
I was surprised at Basil’s little fun. He had his man-bag with its hatchet and knife and rope for good reason, or for reason good for him. Territory past any town’s limit was territory rife with Deliverance-type freaks and fools gone native, full of conspiracy theories and tales of a world destroyed — with fruitcakes, essentially, like Super. Every time we hit Baja, much less the Berkeley Hills, Basil would forage through the mess in his truck to make sure he had his kit. It didn’t matter the fun we made. He’d just tell us to thank him when we’re old, for our necks from the noose that day back when. And the Donner Party especially. I don’t know how many times he’d spun yarns about it, like tales from the crypt, bemoaning, at bottom, their fates as fodder for themselves. The notion he’d end his days in someone else’s stomach was for him the doomsday to beat all doom ever. The man couldn’t see three frames of a zombie flick without breaking into hives. Watching him blow his top was always a gas. Every now and then, just to flip his wig the way I knew it would, I’d break out the drumstick from a turkey or chicken and cackle like hell while the fantods rocked him. If he was joking about the Donner Party now, it meant one thing: he was scared.
“I’m sorry,” Basil said. “It just seemed like a good time to throw caution to the wind.”
Hickory gave him two numb eyes, then went to the CD player and dropped in Murder Ballads, by Nick Cave and his Seeds. A ghost-cold bass sauntered from the speakers, and then that guitar’s staccato chook, the piano leaping at every fourth while the reverb spread like a stain…
So he walked through the rain,
and he walked through the mud
till he came to a place called The Bucket of Blood—
Stagger Lee!
I’D JUST SCANNED AN AD FOR A DILDO INSIDE Dinky’s latest trash, Pink Champagne Bitch, when a turmoil of voices called me back.
“I’m telling you,” Lucille shouted, “someone’s out there!”
Dinky must have heard it, too. He lurched up hideous and swollen and said, “That’s our book… Turn out the lights… No…” Then he cocked an ear to the door. “Who invited her?”
“I came in to check on you,” I said.
“In the dream I was having…” I waited for him to go on about this dream but his words were dribble.
“In the dream you were having what?”
Dinky covered his face with the sheet and coughed. “Maybe we could ask those chuckleheads to put a lid on it. Do you think we could do that, Andrew?”
From the wall above him a clown gazed out with that comically lugubrious expression old people somehow feel compelled to adorn the faces of clowns in art. Dinky’s great-goddamned-grandmother, or someone like her, had probably slapped it up.
“Even if I wanted to,” he said, and looked away, “I couldn’t.” I watched him fumble with his pants. He looked like a child, with a child’s confessional eyes. “Hickory, I mean,” he said, though I’d known what he meant. His lips were trembling. He was speaking of himself as I. “I only wanted someone to hold,” he said. I realized then the clown was staring at me, too, or so it seemed. I hated clowns more than anything, to say nothing of paintings of clowns. And now Dinky had to go and lay a guilt trip out. “About getting her on her back. You know I didn’t mean it… Right?” His hands came up as if with a toxic globe. “Look at me,” he said. I tried to look out the window but only saw myself. “How can a guy get any sleep with that?”
We heard Basil say, “Turn out the lights,” and then Hickory something about a lamp. Meanwhile Lucille had begun to chant: “O my God O my God O my God.”
The sounds were undeniable, clunky and deep at first, like a hammer on a hollow box, scratchy and thin the next. By the time we reached them, Hickory, Basil, and Lucille were at the window again, with just their eyes above the sill.
“Watch it, you guys,” Lucille said. “Someone’s out there.”
“No one’s out there,” Basil said.
Dinky slid down the jamb and turned into a ball. “Is that why we’re all on our hands and knees?”
“There,” Lucille said, and pointed. “Did you see that?”
For just this once I wished she’d been lying, but she had seen what she’d seen. A shadow moved through the rain, then faded into mist. Then the sounds began again, leisurely nearly, steady, like a bridge troll, or maybe a giant, crunching on his bones.
“Who do you think it is?” I whispered.
On a talk show on the tube three enormous women argued round a little man while the singer from his box moaned about a girl with hair full of ribbons and gloves on her hands.
“You’re out of your mind,” Basil said. “I didn’t see dick.”
“Someone is out there,” I said.
“Then that’s it,” Basil said, and strode to the door with his hatchet. “I go out there and holler, and no one answers, I don’t care if it’s the Queen of fucking England, when I see him, he’s as dead as fuck. What’s the matter, baldy?” he said when Dinky wouldn’t budge. “Afraid of the big bad wolf?”
“The guy can hardly walk,” I said.
“He’s good enough to get out of bed, he’s good enough to kick some ass.”
“Blood,” Dinky mumbled. “Bright red blood.”
“Don’t do it,” Hickory said.
Lucille began to wail, something I couldn’t get.
Basil glared. “You coming or not?”
We went into that fist of night, hunched against the rain, scared as hell, too, speaking for myself. Something was out there, in the wallows beneath the deck perchance, lurking and munching, and we were stoned and drunk and tired, to say nothing of critically blind. I looked to Hickory above me, her hand on Dinky’s arm. The best my friend could do was prop himself up to watch. By the way she cradled him, I could tell it was all for show. She wanted him to think she thought he needed checking. The rain had soaked me through again, now. I felt dirty and soft and stupid as could be.
Basil moved crabwise down the stairs, brandishing the hatchet. “Whoever you are,” he said, “you’d better stop fucking around, cause we mean business.”
Once upon a time I’d fancied myself that bearded miser’s secret spy for truth—once upon a time. Because now we were stuck in a game. Anything could happen, anything at all.
“After we go around,” I said, “you stick to the wall, and I’ll slip over by the trees. That way, whoever it is, if he’s got a gun, he can’t get both of us at once.”
“Where’s my knife?”
The water ran down our faces, over the brim of Basil’s hat, his face a glistening shade. I could see his hatchet. I could see his shiny teeth.
“There’s this,” I said, and showed him my Swiss Army pocketknife.
“You little fuck,” he said.
I stepped toward the trees, trying to keep my footing in the mud. Basil crept along the wall until a thick, hollow cloonk sounded through the pitch, and then a muffled humph. He had plunged to the ground and by the time I reached him was rocking to and fro.