Count Geiger's Blues (11 page)

22
Pokeweed and Water Uzis

This long-distance hookup was the worst
Xavier had ever had. Lydia seemed to burble at him from the floor of the Marianas Trench, through a six-mile-long breathing tube:
“. . . ward to . . . ZZZZZZZZZWHR . . . break from the agon . . . SQQQQQWRRRRRHHH . . . nesday . . . KRRRRXXXXXXX.”

“You’re taking R and R?” Xavier shouted. “Is that it? I should expect you soon?”

“SQQQQQQXXXXX . . . The MickKKKKK?”

“Speak to Mikhail? He’s just stepped out, Lydia.”

“. . . kay . . . KRRRZZK . . . uv ya . . . SQQRRZZZZXXXXX.”

Off the phone, Xavier understood that Lydia, but not Phil, would return to the States for two weeks to see The Mick and visit friends in California. She was flying into Sidney Lanier International Airport on Thursday. That gave him two days to find the boy and reinstall him in his ebony sanctum. To complicate the issue, Bari would return from Europe on the same afternoon, and Xavier had to meet both flights.

“Now I get why Zarathustra lived apart from the world,” he told a sympathetic-looking plaster flamingo.

The next morning, Donel Lassiter approached Xavier’s desk and leaned toward him with a friendly confidentiality missing from his behavior ever since Xavier and Lee Stamz had swapped assignments. “I saw Mikhail last night, Xavier.” (It had taken Donel years to call him Xavier, but he still said it as if syllabling aloud the Tetragrammaton.)

Xavier sat bolt upright. “Where?”

“At a pokehouse in Satan’s Cellar. Mikhail was toking some steam in a side room with a passel of hard-trade types.”

A pokehouse was a bistro offering alcoholic drinks and tawdry entertainment, but it was also a front for peddling “salad gas”—the street term for the high imparted by eating chemically treated pokeweed (an ingestible substance now illegal) or by inhaling the fumes rising from a bowl of hot poke (a practice possible only in the weed’s presence and so illegal too). Getting poked, or salad-gassed, was now the substance-abuse pastime of choice among Salonika’s urban poor, specifically those northwest of the river. It hurt Xavier to think that by writing honestly about Count Geiger and company, he had driven The Mick into the arms of poke pushers and salad-gas impresarios. It was too late to help that, but maybe not too late to rescue his nephew.

“A pokehouse? My God. Did you talk to him? Try to get him out of there?”

“No,” Donel said. “The company he was with was too rough for us, and The Mick was so poked he wasn’t aware of much but the vapor fuming off his bowl.”

“Take me there tonight.”

“Maybe Bryan can find it again. I’m not sure I remember how to get there.”

“Donel, you guys will meet me at the EleRail station in Le Grande Park at eight o’clock,” Xavier said. “In the Cellar, we’ll catch a cab.
Don’t
tell me you can’t remember the way.”

*

That evening, Donel and Bryan—lovers who had only recently abandoned their public impersonations of straights—met him at the EleRail in Le Grande Park and rode with him across the river to a nightclub in Satan’s Cellar, a bistro called P. S. Annie’s. It was on a street in an area so bombed-out-looking that some of its denizens called it Pearl Harbor. P. S. Annie’s had a small cover and no minimum—but if you stayed too long without buying into some of the action, either at the card tables or in poke dens off the main cabaret, a bouncer would ask you to leave.

Donel and Bryan stayed in the front room. Xavier made his way into a side room redolent of the characteristic reek of salad gas. He’d read about poke for months, but this was the first time he’d come face to face with any of the pathetic human specimens addicted to it. Although the authorities had tried to confine the epidemic to the Southeast, habitual substance abusers in New York, Chicago, and California had fallen prey to the “redneck allure” of salad gas—partly in response to the high costs of better-known drugs after the bombing of Central and South America’s coca fields, and partly in reaction to the heightened visibility, and coolth, of all things Salonikan.

The Instigator
called getting poked the “white-trash high.” It hinted that celebrities like Emmalyn Pugh, R. X. Haliburton, and Graig Goudray were growing pokeweed in windowboxes or on secluded areas of their estates. To proffer your guests the white-trash high was chic, even if an instant’s rational thought told you that doing so was like substituting crawdad for lobster at a formal dinner. But no spoiled celebrity had ever schlepped into a pokehouse in Salonika or beheld in person the degradation and hopelessness of habitual users who scarfed the stuff not because it was trendy but because it was dead-dirt cheap.

Xavier found the stench in the poke den nauseating. The addicts hunched over warm bowls or Sterno-heated chafing pots were as frail as ghosts. The steam coiling about them gave them an aura of insubstantiality, of eerie semiexistence. If he could keep down the contents of his stomach, it wouldn’t be hard to drag one of these haints outside. A pokeweed junkie would have neither the strength nor the moxy to resist. Xavier moved from table to table, looking at the specters bent over their habits. The faces that pivoted toward him were those of human gargoyles: greenish-grey Halloween masks, haggard mugs from lamely colorized film noirs. Shuddering, Xavier squinted into the choking fog, asked if anybody’d seen a kid nicknamed The Mick, and, getting no reply, stumbled deeper into the poke den’s maw.

“You’re that Xavier Thoxton,” a slurred Good Old Boy voice, mostly baritone, accused. “Thot snooty Fine Orts fellaw on th’
Urbonite
.”

“No,” Xavier said, his wrist encircled by a fat red hand.

“Yaah, you are. Don’ give me no false-modesty crop. Yore pitcher’s in th’ popper ever’ week.”

Xavier found himself sitting next to this poked-up character, a crewcut, ruddy-faced boar of a man who introduced himself as Wilbon T. Stickney. Stickney informed him—over Xavier’s protests of no time, no time, he was looking for a lost child—that, once upon a time, he, Stickney, had been a “true cunnersewer of th’ fine orts: old Brother Dave Gordner comedy records, all thirteen
Nightmore on Elm Street
flicks, them crofty sparts paintings by Leroy Whatz-his-face, and orticles on censarship in
Playboy
,
Penthouse
, and
Hustler
.”

“Mr. Stickney, I’ve got to—”

“Shut up, Thoxtan. I’m trying to tell you somepin. A few manths bock, it turned where I couldn’t listen to Brother Dave, or Jerry Clower, or Minnie Pearl, or any of them comedy people ’thout coming down with a bellyache, a case of dizzies, or a pesky little sore on my tongue. Same ’ith my fovrit slasher vids and trucker paintings on noppy block velvet. Same ’ith my reruns of
Petticoat Junction
and th’ orticles in my cutie books. Somepin’d hoppen ever’ time I tried to eddicate myse’f—a upset stamoch, a eyebrow tic, a wort sprouting orta my thumb. You know.”

“You’re kidding,” Xavier said.

“Naw. Why would I? I mean, it was sarta like I wuddun meant to enjoy th’ fine orts anymare. Like my bady was telling me to give ’em up. ’At ever hoppen to you, Mr. Thoxtan, wi’ yore big-head snooty-hooty jab?”

“No,” Xavier said.

“ ’At’s why I’m a pokeweed junkie—not ’cause I like th’ high ever’bady brogs on. Hell, no. It’s only ’cause it gives me relief from my aches, pains, and whotnats after I’ve jes’ done somepin quasi-clossy.” Stickney put the squeeze on Xavier’s wrist. “You get me, don’ jur, Mr. Thoxtan?”

“I don’t know.”

“It ain’t camplicotted. Before I gat so law as to toot poke, I found other things that’d help—for a while. I just wish they still did me some good.”

Xavier’s wrist hurt. “What kinds of things?”

“It’s emborrossing. I had to gat real law to do myse’f any good. When Brother Dave recards made me sick, I storted calling Dial-a-Breather ever’ urther night or so. When
Nightmore on Elm Street
brake me out in hives, well, I storted renting videos of old forts jocking arf to ’cardian music. They ’uz lousy—really lousy—but my hives’d go away. And when my fovrit warks of ort made my hair fawl, or my knees smell like ronk cheese, or my elbaws blister, I’d head dawntawn, straight for th’ men’s room in a bus stotion, and spend a little time looking at th’ ort wark in th’ restroom stawls. Binger! Cured again.”

“Let go of me,” Xavier said.

Stickney obliged. “Today, none of that lawdawn stuff works for me anymare. For reliable relief, I’m dawn to two things. One of ’em’s this putrid pokeweed.” Stickney nodded at his chafing pot. “Domn it awl to hell.”

“What’s the other?” said Xavier, massaging his wrist. Stickney had mesmerized him. He would have heard him out even if unforced. “Tell me the other.”

“Baxing,” Stickney said. “ ’Fie can wortch a fight on TV—you know, even two old forts clutching and rubbing their laces in each uther’s eyes—uh, I’m fine for a day or two. Thonk Awlmighty God for baxing. It jes’ ain’ on orfun enough.”

Stickney, Xavier realized, had what he had, a peculiar variety of the Philistine Syndrome. A
lower-order
variety of the syndrome, maybe. Radioactivity of some kind—from Plant VanMeter?—had affected Stickney’s metabolism just as it had affected his. The only difference was that Stickney’s concept of the
fine orts
had been several rungs down from Xavier’s. Thus the discrepancy in degree between the higher arts triggering Stickney’s ailments and those triggering his. Thus the discrepancy in degree between the debased arts affording each of them temporary relief.

*

P. S. Annie’s was noisy. Bottles clinked, little tins of Sterno whooshed and puttered, people sang, snuffling noises punctuated any ebbing of the general hullabaloo, and, from a side room to Xavier’s left, hand-clapping, cries, and foot-stomping bounced off the walls and ceiling. A minor riot, thirty or forty feet away.

Stickney’s red nostrils spasmed. He was still trying to talk to Xavier when Donel materialized behind him out of the salad-gas fumes. “We think we just saw him, sir. But when he saw us, he skedaddled.”

Xavier stood, upsetting his chair. “The Mick? For God’s sake, let’s go after him!”

“Bryan’s already chasing him, sir.”

“Call me Xavier, not sir. We’re not in the office, this is Satan’s Cellar.” He made as if to go through P. S. Annie’s main room to the street—but two young men in powder-blue jumpsuits emerged from the fog aiming at them a pair of snaky-looking automatic rifles: Uzis, if he knew anything at all about assault weapons. Amateur white yakuza in their late twenties or early thirties. One was sandy-haired and hollow-eyed, the other well muscled and blue-jowled with stubble. Their jumpsuits—leisure garb, not work clothes—bore big ameoboid stains slightly darker than the surrounding fabric.

“Hands up,” the blue-jowled gunman said, raising the drawbridge of one eyebrow. “Both of you.”

“Shee-it,” Stickney said, inhaling a puff of poke gas. “C’mon, Trey. C’mon, Lamar. Leave theze fellaws be.”

“Keep a-whoofing, Pops,” the stubbly man, said. “But stay outta our bidnuz.”

“
Up!
” the sandy-haired gunman said, illustrating up with his Uzi barrel.

“All I’ve got is credit cards.” Xavier reached for his wallet. “But take them.”

“No,” the stubbly man said. “We don’t give a hobbled he-goat for credit cards.”

“Shee-it,” said Stickney, thrusting his face into his poke-weed steam and withdrawing from the matter.

The gunmen paraded Xavier and Donel at Uzi-point through the poke den’s smothering fog. Their destination was a side room—a bar, as it happened, with a runway upon which two young women in high heels and G-strings were cocking their hips and showing their headlamps on high beam, the same bar room from which all the shouting, hand-clapping, and foot-stomping had issued as Xavier talked with Stickney. The noise from this room hadn’t subsided at all. Men continued to howl, clap, wolf-whistle, gibe, tramp in place. The exposed B-girls, a discolored mirror on the wall behind them, looked bedraggled, defeated, violated. They
weren’t
cocking their hips or showing their headlamps on high beam, Xavier saw. No, not really. They were enduring what P.S. Annie’s patrons were paying them to endure, taking what had to be taken—not with high spirits and good grace, but with repressed anger and true bemusement.

The women’s bodies glistened under the colored spots. Their hair clung to their skulls in sticky strands. They were soaked, their near-nude bodies streaming with . . .
beer
. That was it, that was the smell. The women here had been drenched in warm lager, and the drenching hadn’t stopped, it was continuing. The target-shooters’ Uzis and AK-47s were plastic water rifles. My God, Xavier thought.

The Good Old Boys in Annie’s were drilling streams of beer from authentic-looking weapons at the women struggling to stay upright on the catwalk. They were shooting each woman in the face, in the stomach, and to the huzzas of those urging them to “nail the bitches!” in the sequin-shielded V of her pubic zone. One gunman took his Uzi off Xavier and pointed it at the bent woman on the right. Over and over, he squeezed its trigger, sending rays of beer ricocheting in splashes off her thighs, belly, chest, and spangled crotch. A bearded yahoo at the bar’s other end caught this woman in an amber crossfire. She turned from side to side in her heels, seeking safety where there was none, increasing the likelihood that she’d slip and crack her head.

“Stop!” Xavier shouted. “You damned animals!”

The gunmen laughed. They grabbed Xavier and Donel, pushed them through the cheering crowd to the catwalk, shoved their fake Uzis into Xavier’s and Donel’s hands, and commanded them to “take you some target practice”—a boon not granted to many who weren’t P.S. Annie’s regulars, they pointed out. After all, they’d rented the guns, bought the beer serving for ammunition, and picked out Xavier and Donel because they looked “in outright need of a happy little cunt hunt,” being newspaper dudes with deadlines, late hours, and plenty of other stressful shee-it, right?

“Shoot!” the stubbly-faced man commanded. “It’ll melt the poker you got running up your back from your ass!”