Passing Through the Flame (25 page)

The Ford truck was parked not twenty yards back of this mess. Olsen was pouring heavy machine-gun fire at the three men left standing behind the burning barricade; then they went down. Between the burning roadblock and the Toyota were three dead bodies still clutching their submachine guns and two live men running in circles and firing wildly—must’ve been charging the Toyota when the bazooka and the M-60 opened up. Men from the Ford truck had fanned out on both sides of the road, rounded the burning cars, and were charging up at the two organization soldiers, firing as they came.

One of the two men shrieked, tossed his gun in the air, and fell. Sargent aimed his M-16 at the one remaining target and fired. The man staggered in the air as if buffeted by three or four conflicting crosswinds, then went down. Sargent had no idea whether he had got the last one himself or whether he had been brought down by the massed fire of the Green Mountain Boys advancing up the hill.

The fight couldn’t have lasted more than two or three minutes, two or three minutes of noise and danger during which time had been compressed, two or three minutes with the psychic impact of half an hour. Now there was quiet, except for the soothing burble of the cars burning and the chatter of the men down by the wreckage. The quiet came on as abruptly as the gunfire had, leaving strange echoes in Sargent’s brain. Everything seemed to be moving so slowly now, as his speeded-up reactions found themselves locked in the relatively eventless perspective of mundane reality.

He opened the door of the Toyota and stepped outside into the bright sunlight, and the adrenalin afterglow came over him, a delicious languor much like the moments after orgasm. The sky, he noticed, was a deep clear blue, accented with a few fleecy white clouds, and the richly convoluted tangle of the chaparral seemed to bask in the hot yellow sun, writhing in slow-motion vegetable pleasure. The mingled smells of burning gasoline and gunpowder tickled the back reaches of his brain. He wanted to reach out and touch the billowing black smoke, so rich and tactilely inviting, like a woman’s hair spread across a pillow in the sweet time after a good hard fuck.

Like
her
hair, black hair tinted with the same subtle touch of flame, fanned across the pillow in the motel room on Moorpark, her breasts heaving, her mouth sucking for air, her eyes streaming tears, and his body draped across her loins, the tension, the animal energy slaked and sated.

“How ya doing?” Sargent panted, rolling off her onto his back. He reached over to the dresser for a pack of Camels, took out a joint, lit it, and sucked sweet smoke lazily into his lungs. Almost immediately, the grass seemed to penetrate into every cell of his being, as if moving to fill a biochemical vacuum in his metabolism created by the cathartic draining of stress toxins. He was floating on a cloud of lazy ecstasy, sitting naked in the sun on the bank of a deep river watching the endless waters roll by.

Slowly, Star propped herself up on one elbow and looked at him. Her face was filmed with sweat; her lips were thickened and tender; her skin was reddened and flushed; her eyes were filled with tears. Sargent smiled at her and handed her a joint. He had sure thrown her one hell of a fuck.

“Man...” she said in a flat, unbelieving voice. “Man...”

She took the joint without even looking at it. It dangled from her hand as she continued to look at him with eyes that were passive green pools of attention, drinking him in. No woman had ever looked at him like that before. It should have turned him on, made him feel like the king of the hill, but there was something disturbing about it. Something he wasn’t sure he wanted to understand.

“Do you always make love like that?” she said.

He laid a hand on her thigh. “I’m not always this inspired.” She suddenly, unexpectedly burst into tears. She sobbed once, pushed it back with a lungful of pot, and then was back in control again. But there was a lost, sad look on her face. The face of a young girl who was also eighty years old.

“Hey, what’s the matter?”

“You really don’t know what’s the matter?”

“No, I really don’t know what’s the matter.”

“You poor dumb son of a bitch.” The words were full of contempt, condescension, and loathing. She touched her hand to his cheek, put her other hand gently on his hand resting on her thigh. “You poor dumb son of a bitch,” she said again, and the words were unmistakably words of love, every syllable caressing his ears.

She kissed him very slowly and tenderly on the lips, an affectionate, yet somehow unsexual kiss. Sargent could not remember ever having been kissed like that before.

“What’s the matter is that I’ve seen too much pain,” she said. “I’ve balled too many men in agony. Love and pain are a little mixed up in my head, Chris.”

“That’s nothing to be uptight about,” Sargent said. “You shouldn’t feel bad about liking to be knocked around a little. Most women do. You’ve gotta enjoy doing your thing, whatever it is. It’s the only thing you’ve got.”

“You’re not nearly as bad as you seem.”

“Do I really seem so bad?”

She tore him apart tenderly, holding him in her arms and stroking him as she spoke. “You run around a party putting out vibes that bummer everyone around you, and then you come inches from killing Jango Beck, then you throw me on a motel bed and rape me, and then you ask me if you really seem so bad. Poor baby, you’re so fucked up.”

Sargent didn’t like what was happening to him. He didn’t like it at all. She was turning him on a little, and she was insulting him, and she was telling him she liked him, and she was making him feel guilty when he had nothing to feel guilty about. And she was making him feel sorry for himself. What did he have to feel sorry for himself about?

“I just do my thing,” he said, feeling as he had one time when one of those asshole West Point lifers had called him a degenerate and a murderer for allowing his squad to smoke a little dope while they offed a village that was crawling with Charlie.

“Let me do you
my
thing,” she said. “See if you don’t like it better.” So saying, she snaked her tongue around the shell of his ear, tickled the orifice with its tip, sending a quiver of ecstasy along a previously undreamed-of mainline from the quick of his ear to his loins. She ran her lips slowly down from his ear to his mouth in a trail of sliding moist little kisses, then kissed him tenderly on the lips, sighing into his lungs as she rolled her body over onto him.

Sargent was turned on as he had never been before, burning with passion, but strangely languid. Mechanically, he started to roll her over onto her back, but she stopped him with no more than the barest pressure of her hands around his wrists, spread-eagling his arms across the bed. Then she did a kind of slow push-up above his body till they touched only at legs and lips.

As their lips parted, Sargent opened his eyes, realizing only then that they had been closed for long moments. Floating above him was an apparition, the body of a goddess sculpted from cloud. His body ached deliciously with desire. She was a vision out of horniness in the jungle night, out of everything he had ever wanted and thought he could never get. Having a woman like Star was something he had long imagined, but having her like this was an image that had never formed in his mind before he was treated to the reality. He found himself in the middle of the best moment of his life.

She arced downward slightly, letting her nipples lightly brush the skin of his chest. Sargent quivered with delight. She rotated her shoulders, trailing her nipples down his body to his navel, and he moaned aloud, lost in the electric sensation. She dipped her head in the aurora of flashing black hair and pressed her lips to his right breast, taking the nipple between her teeth. He whited out into ecstasy; instinctive protoplasmic impulses began rotating his pelvis in the rhythm of the spheres. He was out somewhere beyond the moon, orbiting his private Star.

She lowered her body onto his only for a moment, then sat up erect and mounted him like a serenely erect Godiva, her torso arching upward and outward, her outstretched breasts soaring above him like the proud figurehead of a towering sailing ship. He writhed in metabolic pleasure like the animal he was as she rode him with an easy oceanic roll of her hips. His heart was filled with an incoherent love as her eyes locked on his, showing him the ecstasy his pleasure was giving her, throwing it back at him, drowning him in the feedback of his own delight. She was truly
making love to him
, and it filled him with a vast and exquisite tenderness that he had dared not enter before in his life.

He came staring straight up into those liquid green depths, depths that reflected his love for her her love for him his her their delight, and the merging of physical pleasure and love burned that moment into the core of his soul, a piece of him that would glow forever.

Afterward she kissed him, and said nothing, and they nestled in each other’s arms for a long time in contented and meaningful silence.

After some immeasurable eternity, she said, “I’m going to have to go before the sun comes up.”

“I know.”

“I’ll probably never see you again.”

“I know.”

“Can you dig it?”

“No.”

“You can try.”

“Yeah, I can try.”

They didn’t say anything more. Sargent found that he had nothing left to say, that she had said everything. Yet he understood nothing, except that he didn’t feel quite the same inside, that he had been changed in some indefinable way. He couldn’t tell what that difference was, because it was the him that felt it which had been changed. He drifted off to sleep wondering exactly what kind of Chris Sargent would wake up in the morning.

When he awoke, she had evaporated like a succubus of the night. Only her smell lingered as proof that she had been real. Her smell and some small part of him way down inside that had been altered, that made him wake up with a smile and a tender longing that was pleasure, not pain, that made the sunlight streaming in through the window seem brighter. Made the chirp of the birds outside seem like something worth listening to. Made him feel like a new man. Made him hum inside. Aware and alive and whole. A sweet, sweet time.

Sweet as walking down this hill in the sunlight knowing I’m alive and these guinea bastards are dead, he thought, passing by the two dead men who had come closest to the Toyota, closest to ending sweetness for him forever. Below, the boys were breaking out cigarettes and joints, walking aimlessly around the wrecked cars, the dead men, laughing and cursing, blowing off the tension. Howe and Coming were snorting coke, and that pissed him off a little, that was somehow going too far. But what the hell, this is the kind of moment you live for, a job well done, no casualties, a threat removed, an enemy well dealt with, a clear blue sky, and we’ve won and we’re alive!

The Land Rover roared past him, scraping gravel at the side of the road, careening down the hill giddily. Duke and Smith waved at him as they went by, and he waved back. The Green Mountain Boys have done it again.

He found himself wondering why in this moment of triumph he suddenly felt sorry for himself.

Barry Stein parked his blue Karmann Ghia beside a chain-link fence guarding a large truck-dispatching yard. Everything from semis carrying huge rolls of paper to news delivery trucks were parked on the tarmac or loading and unloading at the row of pallets along the back of Smut Factory.

Stein didn’t know very much about Harry Marvin, except that he was one of the richest pornographers in the country. Out here in the nether reaches of the San Fernando Valley, hidden in a grim gray jumble of grimy auto repair shops, tacky gas stations, terminal trailer camps, and enormous Babylonian piles of wrecked cars, Marvin’s huge factory was reputed to be the South Bend of Smut, the Pittsburgh of Porn. Reams of films, books, and magazines poured out of the Smut Factory to pollute the vital bodily fluids of an uptight nation.

For that reason alone, Barry Stein could not help having a soft spot somewhere in his heart for Harry Marvin. The Establishment had good reason to freak out at pornography. Its entire system of social control was based on the thwarted psychic energy of sexual repression. The idea of selling things for the good citizens to masturbate over drove the powers-that-be wild because they knew that they had no control over a man with his dick in his hand.

But on the other hand, Harry Marvin leached on the thwarted sexuality, the loneliness and despair, that was the end product of that control in the lives of the underclass, gorged on it like a bloodsucking toad. He was the lowest form of social vampire—that is to say, the most highly advanced form of parasitic capitalist—and for that reason alone, Barry Stein had cause to loathe him.

As Stein walked through an unmarked door in the plain cement façade of the building and found himself in a small darkened reception area, that ambivalence gave him an uneasy feeling of disorientation.

“Hello, Mr. Stein.” Harry Marvin, a dapper little silver-haired man, had been sitting in a shadowed chair with his back to the door. “Good seeing you again,” he said. “Most of the place is closed, that’s why it’s so dark. Nothing sinister about it. We do most of our work during normal business hours.”

“I didn’t think it looked sinister, Mr. Marvin.”

“You’d be surprised what ignorant people think about the stiffener industry. We’re just manufacturing and distributing a product, like anyone else.”

“Beer cans, cars, cigarettes, housing developments, and sex, it’s all the same, right?”

Harry Marvin beamed. “Right!” he said. “I think we’re going to get along, Mr. Stein.
Barry.
After all, you got a legitimate product to distribute too, don’t you? We’re up against the same bluenosed schmucks, aren’t we? We’ve got to stick together, or the gangsters that own the courts and the government will squeeze us dry every time. Those bastards can’t stand anyone with balls enough to give them the finger.”

Stein felt a sudden, unbidden twinge of friendship for Marvin, a flash of psychic solidarity. After all, there’s no doubt that this guy
has
been giving the Establishment a great big juicy finger for years. And getting away with it.