Benchley, Peter - Novel 07 (22 page)

 
          
 
A hand made of five breakfast sausages
springing from a bologna waved the hundred-dollar bill.

 
          
 
The other hand dwelt beneath the man's nose,
touching one nostril then the other. He sniffled constantly, and each sniffle
ended with a little whistle.

 
          
 
Duke perceived no threat, so he smiled and
said, *'May I show you to a table?"

 
          
 
"Fuck you," said the man, and he
pushed the bill at Duke. "Yes or no?"

 
          
 
"Who are you?" Preston asked.

 
          
 
"Fuck is this?" Sniff. ''Jeopardy?*'
Sniff. "Just get me some toot." Sniff.

 
          
 
Duke said to Preston, "He's
hallucinating."

 
          
 
Preston
said to the man, "Do you know where you are?”

 
          
 
"Hey! Read my fuckin' lips!" Very agitated,
one hand slapping his nose, the other jerking the bill around as if a fish had
hold of it. "Take this and get me some toot! Keep the change."

 
          
 
Duke said, "He doesn't know where he
is."

 
          
 
Preston said, "Let's go call
security."

 
          
 
They took a step back, started to turn away.

 
          
 
"Hey! No!" Frantic. Both hands dug
in the jacket pockets. "Not enough, right? Want more, right? No problem!
Here y'go." Bills flew out of the jacket, crumpled bills and folded bills,
bills of all denominations. Some hung up in the hedge, some slipped into the
dirt, some wedged between the pudgy fingers.

 
          
 
Duke looked at Preston. "This is one
unhappy camper."

 
          
 
Preston said to the man, "I don't know
where you think you are, but this is—''

 
          
 
"Make you a deal. Forget the toot. No
toot. Toot's out of here. Valium. Fifty mills of Valium, you keep the yard.
Okay?"

 
          
 
Preston pointed at the clinic. "This is a
drugstore?"

 
          
 
“I know what the fuck it is! I can't go in
there like this. I gotta go up or down, one way or the other. Can't stay in the
shithouse. Been in the shithouse a couple hours, maybe more, I don't know,
since they pitched me out and left me here."

 
          
 
"Who left you here?"

 
          
 
"They did."

 
          
 
"Who's 'they'?"

 
          
 
"Forget it."

 
          
 
"The point is," Duke said, "you
got it backwards. This is the place they take all that shit away from you, not
where they give it to you."

 
          
 
"You say."

 
          
 
"I been here three weeks, I oughta
know."

 
          
 
"You been here three weeks, you're too
fuckin' stupid to learn the ropes?"

 
          
 
"The guy's amazing," Duke said to
Preston. "A psychic. He hasn't set foot in the door, already he knows the
ropes."

 
          
 
"Believe it," the man said.

 
          
 
"How do you know?" asked Preston.

 
          
 
"Forget it."

 
          
 
Preston said, "This is a waste of
time."

 
          
 
Duke said, "He's blowing smoke."

 
          
 
Preston said to the man, "It gets cold at
night," and this time he and Duke got almost to the door before the man
shouted, "Hey!"

 
          
 
The sound effects were like Wild Kingdom when
a rhinoceros charges through the underbrush at Jim Fowler. With a gasp and a
grunt, the man popped out from the hedge. His aviator glasses hung from one
ear. His jacket was sprinkled with tiny leaves.

 
          
 
"How 'bout at least you take me in there
with you?" The man was pleading. "I go in there alone, they'll lock
me up."

 
          
 
"Say please," Duke said. "I
like to hear you say please."

 
          
 
"Fuck—" the man began. Then he
deflated. "Please."

 
          
 
Preston said, "Why would they want to
lock you up?"

 
          
 
"Everybody always wants to lock me up.
It's a curse."

 
          
 
"Come on, then," Preston said, adding
as the man walked toward them, "I'm Scott. This is Duke."

 
          
 
"Lupone. Willy Lupone. At work they call
me . . . Shit, never mind."

 
          
 
"Unusual name," Duke said.
"Your mother's side?"

 
          
 
Lupone pretended he hadn't heard.

 
          
 
Preston asked, "What do you do?"

 
          
 
"This and that."

 
          
 
"In other words," Duke said,
"forget it."

 
          
 
"Who got you to come here?" Preston
said.

 
          
 
"My family."

 
          
 
"Me, too. An intervention?"

 
          
 
"Huh?"

 
          
 
"They all get together, give you a lot of
grief about all the crap you've done, tell you if you don't go in you'll be
fired, divorced, the whole routine."

 
          
 
"Right," Lupone snorted. "An
intervention."

 
          
 
*'The most unpleasant hour of my life."

 
          
 
"Mine took fifteen seconds."

 
          
 
"Jeez . . . efficient." '

 
          
 
"They are that."

 
          
 
"What'd they say?"

 
          
 
"Not much. 'Puffguts,' they say, 'you go
in the fuckin' joint and clean up your act or we have Li'l Bit— that's my
cousin, they call him Li'l Bit—we have Li'l Bit drown you in a puddle and feed
you to the lampreys.' " He blew specks of dirt off his glasses and put
them on. "Yeah, it's efficient."

 
          
 
Guy Larkin wasn't in his office. Nurse Bridget
had gone to the cafeteria for coffee. So they waited in the lobby with Lupone.

 
          
 
Duke offered him a cigarette.

 
          
 
"Shit's poison, man." Lupone shook
his head. "I don't mess with that."

 
          
 
"You will,"
Preston
said, with an aware little smirk.

 
          
 
"Pretty cocky, pal."

 
          
 
Preston
flushed, but he managed to say, "You'll see."

 
          
 
Duke saw Larkin come out of an office at the
end of the corridor.

 
          
 
"Here comes your welcoming
committee," he said to Lupone. Then he lowered his voice. "I gotta
ask you: What made you think you could get toot in here?"

 
          
 
"I don't think, sonny," Lupone said
flatly. "I know."'

 
          
 
From halfway down the corridor, Larkin called
out, in a phony, two-bit theatrical Italian accent that he probably thought was
terribly friendly and oh-so-clever, "Aha! Thisa musta be Signore Guglielmo
Lupone [googtyellmo looponay]. Benvenuto, amico mio!”

 
          
 
Lupone looked from Laiicin to Duke to
Preston
.

           
 
"Fuck is this?" he said.
"Take-a-guinea-to-lunch week?"

 
          
 
"Say your prayers," Duke said with a
grin, and he patted Lupone on the shoulder. "And keep a tight
asshole."

 
          
 
THE MOTORIST WHO found Natasha Grant's body at
the base of the mountain told reporters he had thought at first it was just a
pile of old clothes that had fallen off a truck, and he was all set to drive on
by.

 
          
 
"So why'd you stop?''

 
          
 
"There was this coyote eatin' on
it."

 
          
 
They liked that. They all scribbled like
sixty, and the two with microphones had to fight to swallow their smiles.

 
          
 
He was having the time of his life.

 
          
 
He was in his late sixties, a chicken farmer
who sold eggs and parts to local restaurants, and save for a brief tour with
the Navy in
Hawaii
near the end of the war he had never been outside
New Mexico
. He had never met a reporter, had never
even seen one except on TV, and here he was, suddenly surrounded by them, and
all of them asking him questions, which was doubly exciting since nobody ever
asked him questions about anything but chickens.

 
          
 
He could see the sheriff over there beside his
car, about to have a fit and wishing all the reporters would die of a wasting
disease. But it was the sheriff's own damn fault: If he hadn't left his radio
on while he was getting gas, then the reporter getting gas on the other side of
the pumps wouldn't have heard the call on the radio and wouldn't have followed
him out here. And the fella at the TV station who always kept his radio tuned
to the police frequency wouldn't have heard the back-and-forth between the
sheriff and his office. And so forth.

 
          
 
Behind the sheriff was the ambulance. They had
given up trying to stuff what was left of the body in a bag and had covered it
with a tarp and were shoving it onto a stretcher.

 
          
 
"You always stop when you see a coyote
eating rags?"

 
          
 
He took his time. They liked juicy answers,
and the juicier his answers the better his chances of actually getting on TV.
Hell, maybe even Entertainment Tonight. After all, Natasha Grant was a star.

 
          
 
"When there's a leg in it," he said.

 
          
 
Score! Scribble, scribble, scribble.

 
          
 
"So you get out of your car and walk over
to—"

 
          
 
"Truck."

 
          
 
"Huh?"

 
          
 
"It's an eighty-two Chevy king-cab kinda
thing I customized myself, with a—"

 
          
 
"Whatever. You walk over there and see
it's not just a pile of rags. What did she look like?"

 
          
 
Pause. Smile. "Kinda like a two-dollar
Mexican dinner."

 
          
 
Confusion. "What?"

 
          
 
“You know: red peppers, melted cheese, guacamole."

 
          
 
"Jesus Christ!"

 
          
 
Too much. They weren't smiling. The cute one
with the microphone looked nauseated. Back off.

 
          
 
"I mean, she was a mess."

 
          
 
“But you could recognize her."

 
          
 
"Oh sure." Just the facts.
"See, it was one side messed up, the side hit the road. Other side was
real peaceful. No question it was the little girl used to spoon with Dean
Stockwell in the picture show."

 
          
 
"Wrap it," said the cute one, and
her cameraman slid the big video off his shoulder.

 
          
 
"This be on Eyewitness News or what? Me
and the wife want to be sure to catch it."

 
          
 
The sheriff declined to make a statement,
wouldn't even let them take his picture, and when they tried, he stood with his
back to the sun where he knew all they'd get was white burnout and a black
blotch on their film or tape or whatever the hell it was. He knew all about
reporters, how they bitch up your meaning by using only the words they like,
how they can even warp a piece of film with you on it by cutting away to the
reporter and showing him—or her, usually her, all the real slimy ones seemed to
be women—with the eyebrow raised or the tongue in the cheek, the expression
saying, "You don't expect me to believe this load of shit." As for
"off the record," he knew what it meant: You tell them something and
they go ahead and use it and claim somebody else told them too.

 
          
 
Fuck 'em. Them and the vans they rode around
in. They'd get nothing from him but bare, undecorated facts, and those not till
they'd been established and verified and given the Good Housekeeping Seal of
Approval.

 
          
 
At the moment there was only one fact, and it
had lain in a heap and drooled out onto the pavement. No problem for the print
guys, but he'd been amused at how the TV jockeys had risen to the challenge,
shooting by it, over it, around it, putting it in shadow, never shooting
directly at it, because you don't want Mom and Pop to spew their TV dinners all
over the set during the evening news.

 
          
 
It wasn't an absolute, incontrovertible fact
that the corpse was Natasha Grant—there was no I.D. on the body—though anybody
who'd ever been to the movies would take an oath. And there was no certainty
about how she had died, though unless she had been hit by a bulldozer going
eighty miles an hour, it was pretty likely she had fallen the four or five
hundred feet from the top of the mountain.

 
          
 
Or been pushed.

 
          
 
Maybe she'd been dead before the fall. Who
knew what kind of splash a dead body'd make from that height, compared to a
live one? Not him. That was the coroner's job. They'd have to wait for the
forensic report, the toxicologist's report.

 
          
 
Maybe she'd been coked-up or freaked-out on
LSD or PCP. A long shot, but you had to check out everything. She'd been out of
the clinic barely three weeks, had already been on the cover of People magazine
telling everybody how great it was to be clean, thanking God for giving her
another chance at life. All the standard B.S. Okay, maybe not B.S., but it sure
was boring. Predictable, that was the word, like there was a hat full of stock
phrases and every celebrity lush dipped in and grabbed a few to describe the
glories of recovery.

 
          
 
What was she doing around here, anyway? She
lived in Beverly Hills, and according to People she'd become a demon on the
A.A. circuit, telling her story to anyone who cared to hear it, helping
stumblebums. The whole nine yards.

 
          
 
Maybe she had come back to speak at the
clinic. Maybe she had secretly checked in again—Christ!—had a slip and didn't
want to admit it.

 
          
 
No. If she was a patient, she'd be in the
clinic, not roaming around the top of the mountain.

 
          
 
He looked up at the mountain. As soon as the
ambulance left, as soon as the reporters got bored poking around and packed up
their gear and took off, he'd go up there and have a look. He thought he
remembered there was a fence around the whole plateau, but maybe it had been
taken down or had a gap in it. He hadn't been up there in a couple years.

 
          
 
No chance of them following him up there.
They'd be stopped at the gate. 'Course, he would be too, but him they'd let in.
He was pretty sure, at least. He couldn't imagine Stone Banner'd make him go
back and get a warrant just to have a look around.

 
          
 
But it was hard to tell where you stood with
Stone Banner at any given time.

 
          
 
He was a quirky kind of guy.

 
          
 
"I'm Scott. I'm an alcoholic." The
word still didn't feel completely natural in Preston's mouth—like a false
tooth, there but not really his—but he was used to it. He didn't feel he had to
deny it. "I feel okay today." He had nothing more to say, but he knew
it wasn't good enough. He didn't have to look at Marcia; he could feel her eyes
on him. Think of something. Like what? Like how hard it is to parse your whole
life, to analyze every mistake, to assess your progress toward some amorphous
serenity—all without appearing to wallow in a sea of self-pity?

 
          
 
No. Just thinking it sounds whiny.

 
          
 
At last he said, "I feel I'm . . . ah . .
. getting there. Little by little. Sometimes it's like trying to crush one rock
with another, but every day the rocks get a little bit smaller."

 
          
 
Now he did look at Marcia. One of her eyes was
closed, the other appraised him. Then it, too, closed, and she sighed. He was
positive he could hear her thinking, Spare us the similes, Scott.

 
          
 
But she let it pass.

 
          
 
She looked over at the new boy, Lupone.

 
          
 
Lupone sat on two chairs, one cheek on each,
and every time he breathed, one of the eight wooden legs protested. He wore the
same checked jacket and the same bouillabaisse tie, but with a plum-colored
shirt.

 
          
 
He was the only person in the clinic who wore
a tie, which, Marcia was sure, was why he wore the tie. To set himself apart.
It was armor worn to warn others to make no assumptions, take no liberties. He
was not one of them. He probably thought he was being subtle.

 
          
 
He had spent forty-eight hours in detox, and
this was his second day in company. She had put up with his belligerent silence
the first day, but today he was going to get with the program.

 
          
 
She said, "William?"

 
          
 
William? Preston thought. Where does she get
William? It's Willy or Guglielmo or Puffguts. But William?

 
          
 
She sounded like a Sunday school teacher
asking a kid if he*s the one responsible for the god-awful stink in here.

 
          
 
Lupone said nothing.

 
          
 
“William, it's time to cut the shit, stop
behaving like a three-year-old."

 
          
 
Color crept up the folds of Lupone's neck,
darkening them almost to the color of his shirt.

 
          
 
“Today you speak, or—"

 
          
 
"Or what?" Lupone turned his head
and fastened his piglike eyes on her. "Yeah, lady, or what?"

 
          
 
"That's a start. Let's discuss the ors.
Either you speak, or—"

 
          
 
"Look, lady, let's get a couple things
straight here. And this has nothing to do with you being a broad or a
shvartzeh, okay?"