Raymond shrugged. He was looking out to sea, out to where the shimmer of the waves met the horizon in an explosion of light as if diamonds were being ground up in a thin band that stretched laterally as far as you could see. “They’re all rich people up there. I guess they just dug the single-malt scotch and green Chartreuse out of their liquor cabinets and forgot about it. Or their wine cellars, or whatever. But the trucks couldn’t get through, so there was no beer, no potato chips, no Slim Jims.”
“What, no Pampers and underarm deodorant? What’s a young mother to do?”
“No Kotex,” Raymond said, tipping back his beer and reaching for another one. The cans were getting warm, though he’d stowed them in the shade, in a crevice between two boulders the size of Volkswagens, but he didn’t mind: warm was better than nothing. He was enjoying himself. “No condoms. No Preparation-H.”
“Yeah,” Sky said, “but let me tell you, those people suck up there. Big-time. And I know from experience, because if you haven’t got a motel key on you to show the cops — right there, show me a motel key, motherfucker — they put you in the car and drive you out to the city limits, period, no arguments. As if this wasn’t America or something.”
Raymond had nothing to say to that. He understood where the city fathers were coming from: who wanted an army of bums camped out on the streets? It turned off the tourists, and the tourists were what made a place like Big Sur click in the first place. Or this town. This town right here.
“So how long?” Sky asked, turning to him with eyes drawn down to slits against the sun.
Raymond took a pull at the fresh beer in his hands and felt warm all over, felt good, felt superior. “I don’t know, a couple days. A week maybe. I had a place but my girlfriend — she’s a bitch, a real queen bitch — kicked me out.”
A rope of muscle flashed across Sky’s shoulders as he reached for another beer and felt for the pop-top. “No,” he said, “I mean how long were the roads closed down, like a week, two weeks, what?”
“Months. Months at least.”
“Wow. Picture that. But if you had beer and jug wine — and maybe a little stash of canned food, Dinty Moore and the like, it must have been like paradise, if not for the cops, I mean. But even the cops. What are they going to do, kick you out of a place that’s already closed off? Kick you out of nowhere? Like, I’m sorry, officer, I’d really like to accommodate you here, but where the fuck you expect me to go, huh, motherfucker? Like, suck on this.”
Raymond took a moment to think about that, about the kind of paradise that must have been, or might have been — or could have been under the right conditions — and then, unaccountably, he found himself staring into the glazed brown eyes of a German shepherd with a foam-flecked muzzle and a red bandanna looped round its neck. One minute there’d been nothing there but the open vista of the sea, and now here was this big panting animal crowding his frame of reference and looking at him as if it expected him to get down on all fours and chase it round the beach. “Nice dog,” Raymond said, giving the broad triangular head a pat. The dog panted, stray grains of sand glistening along the black seam of its lips. Pal, curled up at Sky’s feet, never even so much as twitched a muscle. In the next moment two girls in tube tops and shorts jogged by on the compacted sand at the foot of the waves, beautiful girls with their hair and everything else bouncing in the shattered light, and they shouted for the dog and Raymond eased back and popped another beer, wondering why anybody would want to go to work nine-to-five and live in an apartment you had to kill yourself just to make the rent on when you could just kick back, like this, and let the dogs and the women present themselves to you as if you were a potentate on his throne.
THE NEXT THING HE KNEW, the sun was going down. It balanced there on the flat cobalt palm of the ocean, trembling like the flame of a gas stove, till the water took hold of it and spread it across the surface in even, rippling strokes. The palms turned pink overhead. Birds — or were they bats? — hurled themselves from one shadow to another. Raymond was drunk, deeply, blissfully drunk, the original pair of twelve-packs transubstantiated into short-necked pints of wine, then into liters of Black Cat and finally wine again, out of the gallon jug. Somewhere along the line there had been food — Stagg chili, cold, straight from the can — and there was an interlude during which he sat by the fountain at the foot of the pier while Pal, tricked out in a little blue crepe doll’s dress Sky had dug out of the bottom of a Dumpster, danced and did backflips for the tourists. Now there was the beach, the deep-anchored palm against which he was resting his complicit spine, and the sun drowning itself in color.
The jug came to him, fat and heavy as a bowling ball, and he lifted it to his lips and drank, then passed it on to Sky, who lingered over it before passing it to a tall, mad-haired, slit-eyed guy named Dougie — or was it Droogie? Droogie, yeah. That was it. Like in that old movie, the Kubrick one, and why couldn’t he remember the name of it? Not that it mattered. Not really. Not anymore. All that — movies, books, the knowledge you could wield like a hammer — belonged to another world. Things were more immediate here, more elemental, like where you were going to relieve yourself without getting busted and where the next bottle was coming from.
During the afternoon, he’d spent a fruitful hour removing the left sleeve of his jacket, to give the thing proportion — to make it look as if it were a fashion statement instead of a disaster — but now, as the sun faded, he began to feel a chill at his back and wished he’d left it alone. There was still the problem of where he was going to sleep. It was one thing to sit around and pass a bottle in a circle of like-minded souls, the sun on your face and the sea breeze ruffling the hair at the back of your neck, and another thing altogether to wake up on the sidewalk like some terminal-stage loser with Swiss cheese for a brain.
Droogie — or maybe it was Dougie after all — was going on about the Chumash Casino, how he’d hit a thousand-dollar payoff on a slot machine there one night and booked himself into the bridal suite with a lady and a case of champagne and couldn’t find so much as a nickel in his pocket come morning. Another guy — beard, tattoos, one lens gone from his glasses so it looked as if his eye had been staved in — said that was nothing, he’d scored five g’s at Vegas one time, and then Sky cut in with a question for the group, which had grown to six now, including a woman about thirty who kept picking at the dirty yellow dress she wore over her jeans as if she were trying to break it down into its constituent fibers. Sky wanted to know if anybody felt like a nice pepperoni pizza — or maybe one of those thick-crust Hawaiian jobs, with the pineapple and ham?
Nobody said anything. The jug went round. Finally, from the echoing depths of his inner self, Raymond heard a voice saying, “Yeah, sure. I could go for it.”
“All right, my man,” Sky said, rising up from the cradle of his tree, “you are elected.”
It was all coming from very far off. Raymond didn’t know what was required, didn’t have a clue.
“Come on, man, let’s hump it. I said pizza. Didn’t you hear me? Pizza!”
Then they were making their way through the deep sand above tide line and into the parking lot with its shrouded cars and drifting trash, Pal clicking along behind them. The last pay phone in the world stood at the far end of the lot. Sky dropped two coins into it and gave him his instructions: “Be forceful, be a man who knows what he wants, with his feet up on the padded stool in his condo — and don’t slur. They’ll want a call-back number, but they never call back. Make one up. Or your girlfriend. Use your girlfriend’s number.”