The Nirvana Blues (10 page)

“Nope.”

She replaced the lighter.

Joe said, “I think the problem between you and me is we approach life from two totally different angles.”

“‘Problem'?” Facing him again, she reinfused her cheeks with an almost mystical luster.

“Well, let's say difference, then.” The monkey hopped onto the top of the car and rat-a-tatted his fists against the skimpy metal overhead.

“I think we should get together sometime, Joe. And talk. Seriously. I mean, can't you
feel
it between us? Haven't you always wanted to explore me one day?”

Joe shrugged, confused and embarrassed. A moment ago his guts had lurched, the sexual pop had almost made him shriek. Now she both angered and bored him; time to extricate himself from the conversation. And be alert. Was that her role in all of this—to divert his attention?

He used a timeworn escape route. “Well, you know, I mean, maybe … that is…”

“I honestly believe there's really no need for anybody anywhere to ever suffer,” she said.

“Hey!” His head spun around gratefully. “Here comes the bus!”

*   *   *

B
ATTERED BY TORRENTS
of relief, Joe jumped up: saved by The Bell! Then immediately his heart commenced pounding: Peter was going to descend from that vehicle. Carrying a suitcase full of cocaine? Or an airplane flight bag? Or would it be hidden in a tape recorder?

Veering off the North-South Highway, air brakes whooshing, the Trailways screeched past, traveled down an alleyway and turned around behind the station, then coasted forward to the loading door, facing the highway.

Joe spun around once, frantically expecting a dozen squad cars, cherry-tops blipping and sirens wailing, to come screeching from all directions to nose-diving halts, pinning him, and Peter as he got off, in the circle of their glaring headlights.

When the doors hissed open, Joe staggered numbly forward and placed himself ten feet away, directly in front of them, his eyes squinched almost shut, awaiting the fatal bullet. Arms folded, unperturbed, a lit cigarette between her fingers, Nancy waited nearby, looking real good in a green-and-white-striped jersey, a knee-length denim skirt, and sandals. Sasha kneeled on the Bug's front hood, fiddling with the windshield wipers. To Joe, the world was deathly silent; the tension was unbearable; he knew the universe was about to shatter.…

A smallish boy appeared, sleepily rubbing his eyes with one hand, gripping a blue flight bag in the other. To say the least, the kid looked surly. Lacerating Joe with an evil eye, he limped over to Nancy and burrowed his head into her tummy. She hugged him gently but not gushingly as she asked, “How was the plane ride?”

“Shitty.”

To Joe, Nancy said, “Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.” She punctuated the saying with an appealing shrug, and, abruptly, he liked her again. With that, Sasha uncorked a jibbering shriek. “Oh dear,” Nancy giggled. “His tail is caught under a wiper.”

Nobody else got off. Had Peter foreseen the setup and jumped ship early? Perplexed, Joe waited. Then he paced nervously around the outside of the bus, neck craned, trying to see inside. Still, no floodlights sprang aglare: no loudspeakers ordered him to “FREEZE!” And so, taking another portentous deep breath, he entered the vehicle and walked the length of the aisle. But Peter was not on board. Not even in the lavatory, flushing down the cocaine. Outside again, Joe backed away from the bus, staring at it incredulously. He took a few hesitant steps forward again, stopped, shook his head bewilderedly, and finally, facing the deserted highway, he blurted plaintively:

“You son of a bitch!”

Nancy had made no move to drive away. She stated the obvious: “Your friend didn't arrive.”

“But how could he … but he said … but I
talked
to him! I talked to him just before he left Philadelphia. He gave me the arrival times and everything. It was all planned.”

“Maybe he got sick. Have you been at a place where he could reach you by phone?”

“No. Would you believe this? I wish just once in my life that some plan would function without a hitch! I'm so tired of snarls! You hear me, God?
I'm tired of stinking snarls!
” And if Nancy had not been a witness, he might have commenced bawling.

All that waiting, all his terror, all his premonitions, all his paranoia, all his arrhythmic heartbeats had gone for naught. No cops had appeared, no dope had arrived, not even the evil Ray Verboten and his sanguinary Verbotenettes had made an entrance. What the hell was going on here, a Big Fat Joke?

The sullen driver was removing battered suitcases from the cargo holds. “I had a friend arriving on this bus,” Joe said. “He's a muscular little guy, with curly hair and pop eyes and a big nose. He was probably wearing a black T-shirt.…”

“Nah.” The driver shook his head vehemently.

“Why don't you come over to my house?” Nancy suggested. “I'll give you a cup of hot chocolate.”

“I'd rather have a double shot of bourbon.”

“Then you'll have to go elsewhere. I don't stock liquor.”

“What are you, some kind of health nut?”

“I'm a vegetarian. And I don't drink.”

“You just smoke two packs of cigarettes a day.” Joe loved it. The valley was crawling with freaks who shopped at the co-ops, ate only organic edibles, practiced yoga three times a day, and then blew out their anodes, cathodes, diodes, and guts with pot, mescaline, acid, Quaaludes, you name it. They all dropped dead at forty from hepatitis complicated by flashback traumas.

Nancy's face was a study in amused chagrin. “Like the saying goes, ‘Nobody's perfect.'”

Given the hour and the situation, Joe knew he should go home. The evening's tension had left him exhausted, and anyway, now he had auxiliary plans to fashion. Where was Peter? And the dope? They probably couldn't meet in Tribby's plane tomorrow. Suppose Peter had been arrested in Philadelphia? Or elsewhere en route? He had better telephone Peter's wife, Julane. Though not tonight—no point in raising the alarm before his friend had had a chance to communicate, explaining things. I've suffered enough for one evening, Joe thought. What I need now is sleep. Heidi might worry if she awoke, finding him still absent. The day was over … good riddance … tomorrow would be better.

Yet Joe was caught in the grip of a childish truculence. He wanted to vent his relief, his anger, his frustrations. Or at least allow his disappointment to dissipate before heading home. Once more, for the ten billionth time, he had somehow been played for a sucker, been stood up again, been left holding the bag. He had psyched himself to be ready for anything—a shootout, death, life imprisonment, even success. Now he would have to prepare all over again: talk about fatigue!

Though technically he despised self-pity, Joe had decided to feel sorry for himself. And there was that hideously placid woman just sitting tight, smirking like a lobotomized ninny, totally in control of everything. Though the monkey had squashed a banana, pissed on the windshield, banged on the roof, and caught his tail in a wiper, she hadn't once flinched! Joe hated her. Yet he could use a transfusion of such equanimity. Her calm near the heart of his storm seemed very seductive. So why not have a little adventure, indulge his curiosity? After tonight's traumatic anticlimax he owed himself a favor. No point in trotting home obediently this empty-handed, especially when an explanation of utter disaster might await him there. “Joe, Joe, Peter got off the bus in Higginsville, Missouri, went to the corner café for a paper, and never returned!”

PHILADELPHIA WAITER, A MAFIA DRUG COURIER, DISAPPEARS IN MIDAMERICA
!
ROTH AND HOFFA BONES LOCATED IN SAME GRAVE
!

“Oh all right,” Joe grumbled artlessly. “I guess I'd like to come over for a quick hot chocolate.”

Hardly had the words left his mouth than his entire innards lurched again, his groin prickled and contracted, he experienced a chilly sweat. Tonight hadn't provided enough sensations already: now he was going for broke!

“Follow me, then.” Those words entered his ears sounding unlike any others she had spoken. It was as if they had been uttered in a foreign language. Loaded with positively thundering innuendo, they threatened to explode inside his head, splashing his brains all over the microbus.

“Ow!” Bradley shrieked.
“Ow, ow, ow!”

“What's the matter?” Nancy asked.

“Sasha bit me!”

“Oh that silly Sasha.”

“I'm gonna kill him, Mom! I'm gonna kick his guts out!”

“Now now, he didn't mean to hurt you dear. It was probably only a love bite, because he's glad to see you.”

By the time, three minutes later, that he pulled up behind her VW in a Perry Kahn Subdivision #4 tract-house driveway, flight, pure and simple, occupied Joe's mind. “Go home, make sure the kids are covered,” he urged himself. “Go to bed. Snuggle up against Heidi's warmth. Forget about Peter, forget about Nancy, forget about the coke, to hell with the land and Eloy Irribarren! There's still time.”

Instead, he offered to carry Bradley inside. Thanking him, Nancy led Joe to the tiny concrete front stoop. Using no key, she opened the front door of her flimsy box-shaped dwelling. Sasha scampered in ahead of them twittering like a nervous bird.

“Don't you ever lock your door?” Joe asked.

“Nobody will rob me.” She spoke with the type of assurance the pope might have used saying “I am a servant of God.”

*   *   *

J
OE HAD NEVER
entered a similar house in Chamisaville. A tiny three-bedroom ultra-tract building, it had one bathroom, a living room, and a linoleumed kitchen with a washer-dryer, a dishwasher, and a built-in stove. Clean as a whistle, completely deodorized, it seemed manufactured out of cardboard. Midnight-blue wall-to-wall carpet sheathed the living-room floor. Cheap gold drapes shielded the sliding aluminum windows. The few furniture pieces were modern Scandinavian, except for a large puffy couch. A single stained walnut bookcase housed a stereo set, an enormous color TV console, and many books on various aspects of psychic and spiritual experience, ranging from Alice Bailey and Elizabeth Kübler-Ross to Edgar Cayce and the Lao-tzu. All the walls were dominated by enormous Nikita Smatterling paintings. Garish, and clichéd, though somehow quite friendly, they featured wispy, cosmic monkeys dressed in flowing robes, and wrapped in brilliantly colored auras. Joe's immediate reaction was simply that they were pretty but lousy paintings. Not the subject matter, but the fact that so many of them abounded, bothered him a little.

While she puttered elsewhere, Joe put Bradley down, saucepanned some milk for hot chocolate, and checked out the refrigerator. Absolutely devoid of life's staffs—baloney, mayonnaise, Swiss cheese, marshmallow fluff—it teemed instead with vegetables, papaya juice, and jars of lecithin and tiger's milk. Groaning, Joe retreated to the living-room couch, from where—like a befuddled tourist who had just tumbled down a rabbit hole—he glowered uncomfortably at the fluorescent monkeys peacefully mocking him. Sasha entered the living room, grinned at Joe, then turned, proferring his neat little butt. He stuck a marble into his anus and pooted it out propelled by a fart, so that it sailed a few feet before bouncing to earth.

Five minutes later, while they sipped on the warm milk to a musical background of Emmylou Harris and “Delta Dawn,” Joe asked, “How come so many monkey paintings?”

Nancy sat cross-legged on the blue rug in front of him. “I don't think you would understand if I explained, so I'd rather not explain right now.”

They chatted about other things. Joe blithered through, nearly incapacitated by fatigue and disinterest. Life was a bitch. Half an hour ago he had been drooling for Nancy: but now he thought her silly, just another suburban housewife concerned about her kid, her vitamins, her interplanetary travels. Why is it, he brooded, that every twenty-eight-to-thirty-five-year-old single woman he had ever known came with a ready-made seven-year-old kid?

She disinterred the topic of their potential affinity for each other. A young Doberman pinscher padded threateningly into the room and sniffed him, then ambled to a corner, curled up, and started snoring with one eye open, glassily fixed on Joe. A parakeet cage dangled in a corner: gradually, Joe realized that a small bird was perched atop, rather than inside, the cage. A thick candle, in a tall glass holder on the fireplace mantel, flickered. An incense stick burned beside the picture of a cheerful roly-poly gnome in a gold frame. A similar photograph leaned against a potted aloe vera plant on the kitchen counter. Another likeness of the same jolly elfin fellow helped clutter the bathroom window ledge, Joe discovered, when he ventured yonder to take a leak.

Sasha opened the desk drawer, removing a box of rubber bands. Squatting in front of the Doberman, he fixed a rubber band on his index finger, pointed like a gun, and shot the dog in the head. The Doberman growled, but Sasha blithely continued his game. Each time a projectile bounced off the dog's thick skull, it snarled irritably, but did nothing. Nancy ignored the whole scene.

About halfway through his hot chocolate, Joe's mood altered again. Pleasantly woozy, he gave himself up to drifting, answering her probes and inquiries good-naturedly and half-assedly without paying much attention. Things chugged, clicked, and hummed in her efficient little tract home, and to his surprise, once the initial shock wore off, Joe liked it. The place felt cozy. Not for ages had he sat in a house that wasn't crammed with spider webs and hundred-year-old vigas spilling dust down from dirt roofs onto ragtag conglomerations of colorful, secondhand (asthma-inducing) furniture.

After a while, her talk honed in on left-brain and right-brain people. A few complex German names that she threw out meant nothing. His cultural deficiencies started glaring. But eventually she got down to it.