Made to Break (4 page)

“Banged them in the ear, more like it,” Basil said. “Knocked what was left of their rocks clean out.”

Hickory said, “But wouldn't it be a marvel if he and Dinky were blood?”

Basil was pacing. “What are we going to do about my truck?” He poked Dinky's arm. “Cause in case you guys didn't know, good old shit for brains here was right for once in his life. The weatherman says it's going to flood like hell.”

“Limo Wreck” became “The Day I Tried to Live.” We gaped speechless at the phone till Hickory's sigh confirmed the real.

“We're stuck,” she said.

Basil took up his knife. For a long time he gave us his back, running a thumb down the blade, but then he spun round and flung the thing at a pile of wood.

“You two morons are so lucky,” he said after his knife had clattered to the floor. “I should skin you both, right here and now.”

“You're lucky Granddad isn't here to skin
you
,” Dinky said. “Granddad wouldn't like the way you're treating his place.”

Lucille's face looked suddenly very stupid, like some girl about to get killed in a flick. “Did you hear that?” she said. No one said a word. “It was a voice,” she said. “Like some horrible singing.”

“You might remember, kids,” Basil said, “there's something out there called a storm?”

“Sometimes,
squeeze
,” Lucille said, “I think about what a bummer it is I'm not a man. I'd fuck you so hard you'd never—”

Subtle though it was, the sound repeated, just as Lucille had said, like some horrible singing. She went to the window—followed by me and Hickory and Basil with his hatchet—and moved from it to the next.

“Maybe it was a bear,” she said after we'd covered the place for nothing.

Again Basil turned on her. “That's about as retarded as when you didn't know what a belly button is.” This was true. At a lobster joint north of Ensenada, Lucille had downed a pitcher of booze and claimed belly buttons the stuff of shots at birth.

“Bears hibernate, Lucille,” Dinky said.

“Yeah, well,” Lucille said, grimacing at Basil, “at least I don't have a dick that hooks off thirty degrees right.” She brushed a lock of hair from her face. “Fucking banana dick.”

Now this was something not even I had ever heard. In all the time I'd known Basil, he'd never mentioned a faulty unit. “You're kidding,” I said.

We all turned to the giant and watched his face screw up. He began to stutter, but that didn't work either, so he poured himself a drink.

“Anyway,” he said, “there's nothing out there.”

“There's nothing out there
now
,” Hickory said.

“Who's your closest neighbor?” I said.

“We don't have neighbors,” Dinky said. “We've got fences.”

“Turn out the lights,” I said.

“Fuck you,” Basil said.

“So we can see what's out there.”

Again we peered out the window, looking for shapes, a car, a ghost, whatever, but found the same old rain and trees in the same old howling night, the same uncanny sense of possibilities imminent.

“The wind can do some batty shit,” Basil said, and raised his glass in a toast. “Here's to Buddy Time.”

Hickory stood close against me, jungle sweet, the smell of her strong, cucumber and vanilla. Her hand covered mine, she smiled, my hand was in hers, my hand was in her hand. I wanted to eat her teeth, then. I wanted to climb inside her, tired and full, and fall into precious sleep.

“Days like this,” she said, “they say
damn the water and burn the wine
.”

“Sounds to us,” Dinky said, “a bit like that
seize the day
crap everyone's been spouting.”

Lucille picked up
Fear and Loathing
. “‘We had two bags of grass,' she said, reading from the cover, ‘seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls.' Is that cool or what?” she said, and tossed the book down.

“Everyone knows Hunter S is our hero,” Dinky said. “His work with the Hell's Angels was nothing short of revolutionary.”

“Now that,” Basil said, “I'll give you.”

“They even put a contract out on him for it. Who's that Indian fellow, Rushdie or whoever the heck?” Dinky turned away to cough. “Excuse us,” he said, wiping his mouth with an arm. “The guy the Ayatollah wants offed? An
ant. A
literary microbe squirming in the shadow of the god.” He shuffled over and held out the book like the Bible itself. “‘He who makes a beast of himself,' he said, quoting from the epigraph, ‘gets rid of the pain of being a man.'” He took a moment to stare us down. “Hunter S,” he said, “showed us all who we really are.”

“I got to give it to you one more time, Dink,” Basil said, slapping him on the back. “You poor fuckless fart.”

“Hey you guys,” Hickory said. “Guess what?”

“What?” Basil said.

“Lick my butt!” Hickory said, and burst out laughing. She was whacking on her knee like some old gal from Arkansas. “No, but seriously. Anybody here ever play Truth or Dare?”

“We won't play,” Dinky said, “but we'll sure watch.” He
beamed at Hickory and made an effort to grin. “We
like
to watch.”

Hickory led Lucille to the center of the room and plopped down on the floor. “Come along now, Basil darling,” she said. “We're dying to know your secrets.”

Basil scratched his balls. “I like a good dare every now and then. Keeps me on my toes.”

“Bring the hooch,” I said, “and whatever else.”

“Perchance we could change the music?” Hickory said. “And that abominable machine as well,” she said, indicating the TV. “Please.”

“‘4th of July,'” Basil said, “is one of the great all-timers.”

“Try the Jelly Roll Morton.”

Some talk went round how the old master thought a Haitian witch had cursed him. Dinky, back on the couch, said that in the end Jelly Roll had taken to acting like Howard Hughes.

“The guy never ventured out,” he said. “And nobody cursed him, either. He'd simply trapped himself in his own little cage of fear. At least that's our view. For what it's worth.”

“Break out the Jelly Roll,
squeeze
!”

“Damn it, woman,” Basil said. “How many times do I have to tell you not to call me that in public?”

Lucille squinted. “This is public?”

WE'D MET HICKORY AT A PARTY IN THE CITY. TO get inside, you had to take an ancient lift, the kind with a platform behind a metal door that wouldn't budge without a couple of trolls to heave on some old chain. They even had a bellhop, in a red-velvet monkey suit and pillbox hat with a strap. For eyebrows the kid had little steel barbells, five or six per side, and for teeth real fangs, straight-up Lestat. And if that weren't enough, he was running Maori-style ink on his chin, and every patch of his face but that was goofy with shiny dust.

Before us lay a massive room, probably two- or three-hundred yards long and half as wide, chockful with every type of gork in the book. Guys with bunless chaps ran around the place smacking each other with crops. Chicks, too, more than half of them decked out like Catwoman, scampered about with nipple clamps and whips and chains, wreaking all manner of hell. There were go-go dancers in bubbles and cages, Rastafaris, homeboys, deathrockers and mods, rockabilly kids, swingers and punks, not to mention your basic Haight Street hipsters. Jumbotrons swayed from the ceilings flashing clever retromercials, and thrift-store TVs lined the walls fuzzy with chickens in the slaughterhouse and Japanimation and big-time sex acts, the whole of it swamped in banks of chemical fog. Some heavy-duty industrial house provided the coup de grâce for this
late-night get down, pumping so hard you could feel it from the marrow in your bones to the depths of your aching nards. The four of us snagged some drinks and split, the two traitors one way, Dinky and I the next.

We stumbled on our girl in some sort of cave, everyone but her stupid with dope. In her tight corduroys and glittering boots, she sat among thirty or forty crackpot fiends sucking fingers, faces, toes, whatever their mouths could hold. But what stung most was the guy beside her, an image to the T of my old toad in a picture I'd seen when he was a Hare Krishna. He had fierce blue eyes and a queue from his head, all the way down his back. He was even wearing bamboo thongs. Soon, however, he slipped off, and I forgot him and was glad. Jerks by the droves kept trying to get their paws on Hickory, but she sat among them cool as a queen, there, as she'd said, “to take in all the footage.” We never asked her name, and she never said. It was Dinky laid the moniker down. “You look like a Hickory girl if ever we've seen one,” he told her, to which she said, “Hickory dickory dock, the mouse ran up the clock.” All the while her face lay before us unreadable as Chinese kanji. I remember staring at her for a preposterously long time, asking myself just who in hell this willow was, with the ovate eyes and strong white teeth, and me like a doofus trying to smile.

So I'd known what I wanted before the game had begun. The problem was, having so much to want, I had to choose.

“What's your name?” I said. “Your
real
name.”

No one but Dinky would've expected that. Neither Basil nor Lucille had ever known Hickory wasn't Hickory. The day we introduced her, it was
Hickory, meet Basil and Lucille
. Their faces didn't quite know what to do.

“I've always wondered,” Hickory said, “why none of you have asked.”

“It can't be more fucked up than Hickory,” Basil said.

“Elmira Pugsley?” Hickory said.

“It's different,” Lucille said. “That's for sure.”

“It's after my granny. But since the point here's to be totally honest—and I'm a totally honest gal—the full name's Elmira Beatrice Pugsley.”

Basil clicked his tongue. “Poor,
poor
girl,” he said.

“No wonder you go around letting everyone call you Hickory,” Lucille said.

Dinky burbled from the couch. “We don't think that's very nice, now do we?”

“Who asked you to wake up, hey moron?” Basil said.

“The middle name,” Hickory went on, “that was my father's doing. They were farmer hippies.”

“You,” I said, “come from
hippies
?”

Hickory smiled. “I spent the first ten years of my life on a commune up in Oregon. We had beehives and everything. Organic bees. Organic everything.”

“Poor, poor girl,” Basil said.

Hickory put her chin in her palm and looked us over. When she stopped at me I knew what she wanted, but then she passed to Basil. “You, tough guy. Which will it be?”

“Toss a mop on the floor,” I said at Basil's show of squirming. “See which way it flops.”

Even as I said this it struck me just how much we didn't care what Basil did. We knew—or at least I knew, or thought I knew—that either way he turned wouldn't change a thing. How could he choose when he had no choice, the difference between a Truth or Dare having collapsed beneath their emptiness? For Basil, to be honest meant to be daring. And however strangely, however sadly, daring was as close as Basil ever got to truth. The notions had become two mirrors reflecting only themselves.

“Goddamn it,” Basil said. “
Shit
. Truth.”

“Oh dear yes, quite lovely indeed,” Hickory said in this high-society debutante voice. “Now. What's the most shameful thing you've ever done—sexually, I mean?” Basil looked blank, so Hickory said, “Of course I mean shameful in the traditional sense, the sub
urban
sense.”

“I can tell you
that
,” Lucille said. “It happened only last week, when he greased me up like a Thanksgiving turkey and tried to—”

“I already heard that story,” I said. Lucille turned with gaping eyes. “He told me
every
thing,” I said.

“Everything?” she said.

Basil cleared his throat. “When I was a kid,” he said, “I had a stuffed monkey.”

“How old are we talking?” Hickory said.

“Twelve or thirteen, I guess. My dad had given it to me before he took off. Anyways, it had this hole in its crotch. It started out little, but kept getting bigger.” Basil had been slouching forward as he talked. Now he planted his hands on the floor, as if the telling were over.

“What kind of story is that?” I said.

Basil's face was flushing now. “There's more,” he said.

“Come, come,” Hickory said.

“One day I was in the closet.”