“You remember Gerry, right? She was gone a long time, but she came back. This here is Wendy.” He touched the head of the woman on the floor beside him. “I call her ‘hot and juicy’ sometimes, but I don’t do it very often, and nobody else does it.”
HE FIGURED HE COULD NOT ASK WHERE GERRY HAD BEEN. He saw in the hardness of Richard’s look that the point was that she had come back because he had wanted her there.
“I dig you need the Laetrile, man, and I got it. It was easy, but that’s because I been at it a while, right? Now here is the bit…”
As Richard talked, Allen listened to the way he chose his words. His language was odd, theatrical, and a little old-fashioned. He figured it for a mix of Chicano inflection and, probably, words and phrases picked up from Gerry. It struck him that Gerry had been in prison while she was away. He remembered her use of heroin from the beginning. That would account for the dated quality of Richard’s speech. What had not changed was the sharpness of Richard’s intelligence; even through the jargon Allen could hear his wit and intensity. Though he had gotten his language from outside of himself, he was in charge of those who he had gotten it from. Still, there was this room in this house and the two women. Regardless of his power and ability, his situations always seemed seedy and smalltime. And he often got caught at what he did. Allen remembered two drug busts early on when they were still in college. He suspected it was the strangeness of some deep and hidden moral sense in Richard that caused him to put himself in situations where he would fail.
He suspected also that it was this moral sense that was the link between them. Coming from similar backgrounds, connecting in the Medical Corps in the Navy, attending college together, they could have become each other easily. Even after the added covering often years, he could sense it — this accident of their dir — ections — and he felt tenderly about it. It was clear from Richard’s composure that he owned Gerry, probably the other woman as well.
“… So you drop one of the boxes in Tombstone, the other off in K.C. The bread goes to my mother’s house in Detroit. You can cop the Laetrile and the works now, or you can wait till later. It’s an easy gig. So that’s it for business. Wanna snort a line?”
The sex had more power for him when it came back in memory. The little plastic moon only became apparent when Gerry had dropped the Venetians and dimmed the lights. The one behind him was Gerry, though he had wanted her in front. It had not been appropriate to indicate this, because he had given over all control. He had at first felt the fact of Richard’s watching in a tender way. He had seemed, for the first time in their long acquaintance, relaxed and centered. He had not seemed vulnerable, but he had seemed in tune. But that had changed after a while, and Allen began to be aware of something dark and a little uncomfortable in the watching. The rest of it was a kind of intense activity, practiced to some rules that he was unaware of but was guided through. He recalled he had avoided the touch of Wendy’s arms, had not wanted to call her by that other name, and that Gerry had kept her face hidden along his flanks.
THEY CAME THROUGH A CUT IN THE LOW HILLS AND started their slow descent into Tucson. The moon was still to their left. Much of the city was dark, but there were flickers of light enough to define its shape in the shallow cup of its valley. Fingers of lights trailed off from it up into the foothills, and closer to them, where the valley emptied into the lower hills and the desert, the broadest finger, the rows of motels and neon shopping plazas of the city’s haphazard expansion, reached toward them. “Tucson,” Bob White whispered, his fingers opening and flexing in his lap, his palms running slowly back and forth over his knees. She stirred at the sound of the spoken word, shifted her position slightly in the corner of the backseat behind him; he caught an edge of her shoulder in the rearview mirror. He noticed his left hand clenched tight to the wheel, his white fingers. He relaxed it slightly and shifted his body in the seat. Bob White handed him a lit cigarette. He took it across the space between them, looked over and nodded. Bob White settled back against the door, his hands now at rest on his thighs. Allen adjusted the vent to keep the smoke from filling the car. He slowed down a little.
SHE SAT IN THE CHAIR IN THE MOTEL ROOM FACING HIM, her head propped up on a pillow, five little drops of sweat symmetrical on her forehead, the ends of her hair still wet, but beginning to curl, where they had touched the water of her bath. Small in his terrycloth robe, which seemed darker in shadows alongside the light, adjusted to bathe her right arm from the wrist to the biceps: the arm bent, the palm open on her knee, the crook at the front of her elbow in half-shadow, as if blood gathered there and she was in post-mortem lividity.
“Squeeze,” he said, and her fingers came up and gathered around the red ball he had placed in her palm, pressing it so that her thin biceps flexed and the rubber hose around it tightened. The ball was the one he used to improve his grip strength; he could squeeze it flat in his hand. He could see she could not make a dent in it. Sweating more profusely now, drops in the outside corners of her eyes, one on the bridge of her nose, she turned her head slightly, away from the spot touched more by the light, now that he took her wrist and extended her arm a little. He slapped her with two fingers, sharply, and the vein rose and the artery that crossed it, the pattern as particular as her palm lines, shallow streams around the ball in her hand running with perspiration. He lifted the needle, the syringe attached to it; he took a cotton swab damp with alcohol and brushed it over the vein. Outside, on the cave of the breezeway, a mockingbird was singing other people’s songs. He placed the needle along her forearm in line with the vein, the bevel up. With a quick jab he inserted it.
Her flinch was almost imperceptible, a small intake of breath only. The bird quit singing, a car ground on the gravel in the distance, some Spanish was being spoken. The slight surge of her blood pushed back on the plunger against his thumb; he let a little of it into the syringe. She opened her hand slowly when he told her to. The red ball sat wet on her palm. He snapped the tourniquet from her biceps; the pressure against his thumb diminished.
When he detached the syringe from the needle, a few drops of blood fell out on her arm. He attached the thin clear hose connect-ed to the glass bottle hanging from the lamp and opened the clamp. Blood entered the hose, then the clear liquid from the bottle cleared it. He stood up from where he was kneeling before her. He adjusted the clamp so that a slow regular dropping of the liquid entered the hose near the neck of the bottle. He taped the needle to her arm. He wiped up the few drops of blood with a tissue, which he folded and then wiped her brow with it. She turned back and smiled at him. For a moment he had felt a release of intensity when the act was finished; he had felt suddenly very tired. When she smiled at him, he surged again.
“Okay?” he asked.
“Okay,” she said.
HE LIKED THE FEATHER TOUCH OF HER FINGERS ON HIS spine playing some light music. She made little sounds when he sucked a piece of flesh on her arm into his mouth, making a circle. He bought her a silk scarf to keep her collars from chafing against her neck. She bought him a snakeskin wallet. He bought her pieces of Indian jewelry. She cooked him fancy desserts on occasion. When he carried her from place to place he kept his hands open and flat against her flesh. She had away of giving herself over to his carrying. He carried her often. He stood while he made love to her, sometimes, so as not to injure her body by pressing too hard against it. She bought him a silk robe, Japanese style, and turned her head away shyly. She ate everything still but favored things that were spoonable. He spoke to her while she was sleeping. Her skin had grown slack in its struggle, but there were no significant lines in it. He bought her a small flashlight. He liked the way her voice trailed off at the ends of her sentences. She bought him Johnny Walker Scotch and took an occasional puff on his cigarette. He found that even her thin waist had grown thinner when he placed his hands around it. She placed her lips on his neck when he carried her. He liked to buy her pieces of fruit.