Benchley, Peter - Novel 07 (5 page)

 
          
 
His pace slowed. Chuck looked at him, saw what
he was looking at, and said, "Don't even think about it. You show up at
Banner blasted, they'll lock you up and put you through the whole detox
number."

 
          
 
They stepped onto an escalator leading down to
the baggage area. "So," Chuck said pleasantly. "You're a
juicer."

 
          
 
"A what?"

 
          
 
“Makes sense. Fella dressed like you, it's
either juice or blow, and you don't have blow in your eyes."

 
          
 
Preston
stared at him.

 
          
 
“Me, I was into blow. Forty grand a
year." He shook his head. “Can't believe it, looking back."

 
          
 
They collected
Preston
's suitcase. Chuck's hand wouldn't fit
inside the handle, so he hung it from one finger. On him the suitcase looked
like a purse.

 
          
 
“Where did you play football?"
Preston
asked as he followed Chuck out of the
terminal and into the parking lot. The question was not a guess: A man Chuck's
size had been either a football player or a backhoe.

 
          
 
“TCU, then the Steelers for three seasons. I
was just getting good when some dude showed me how much fun it was to shove
shit up my nose."

 
          
 
“Oh. I'm . . . sorry."

 
          
 
“Yeah. Like they say, life's a bitch, then you
die."

 
          
 
The car was a black Cadillac limousine with
the letters B. C, stenciled in gold italics on the driver's door. Chuck dropped
the suitcase in the trunk and opened one of the back doors. "There's fruit
juice and sodas and stuff," he said. "And a TV if you want to watch
fuzz and squiggly lines."

 
          
 
"You mind if I sit up front? I don't feel
like riding in a hearse."

 
          
 
"Suit yourself." Chuck reached to
open the front door. "I'm supposed to tell you: If you feel the need to
regurgitate or defecate, please give me enough notice so I can pull over to the
side of the road."

 
          
 
''What?"

 
          
 
"Don't blame me. They make me use those
words."

 
          
 
Preston
got
in. Chuck shut the door and went around to the driver's side and squeezed
behind the wheel.

 
          
 
“Do people do that?"
Preston
asked.

 
          
 
“Oh yeah. I had a guy—a priest, for
crissakes—take a dump on the floor. Another time, I had this poet who said I
was like that guy Charon, you know, the one who guards the River Styx? 'Chuck,'
he says, 'they all pass your way.' Then he puked."

 
          
 
"Well, you don't have to worry about me.
I'm fine."

 
          
 
"Right." Chuck's lip curled in what
may have been a smile. ""Now you're fine. Tell me how you feel when
we get closer." He pulled out of the parking lot and headed north.

 
          
 
For a while, the landscape was all taco stands
and gas stations and curio shops and by-the-hour motels. Then the sleaze
thinned out, and Chuck turned off the highway and aimed the bow of the ebony
ship into what struck
Preston
as perfect Hunter Thompson country—a ribbon
of shimmering pavement that led directly to hell. On all sides, nothing but
sand and cactus; ahead, nothing at all.

 
          
 
Preston
's
stomach growled as a bubble of gas caromed around a cavity. He swallowed bile
and said, just to hear the sound of a human voice, "Everybody spends a
month here?"

 
          
 
"If you shape up. Stormy Weathers was
here six months. They decide for you. If you got any brains, you do what they
say.''

 
          
 
"They're that good?" He craved
comfort.

 
          
 
"The best. The story is, when Stone
Banner dried himself out and decided to start his own joint, he stole the best
people and the best gimmicks from all over the country. Smart. Specially for
some dude who made his name sitting on a horse, hollering 'Let's get 'em,
boys!' "

 
          
 
“What's he like? Banner."

 
          
 
Chuck reached into his shirt pocket for a pack
of cigarettes. He said only, “He's helped a pile of people." He offered
Preston
a cigarette.

 
          
 
Preston
shook his head. "I don't."

 
          
 
“You will." Chuck lit up.

 
          
 
“I haven't smoked in fifteen years."

 
          
 
“Uh-huh." His face was expressionless.

 
          
 
Smug,
Preston
decided. That was the word for these
people, for Chuck and Dolores Stark. They thought they knew everything.
Everyone was predictable, followed a pattern. Surprises were against the law.

 
          
 
Preston
said,
“Are you a Calvinist?"

 
          
 
“You mean like a Moonie? No way."

 
          
 
A tiny town rose in the heat haze and hung
like a mirage over the desert and then soundlessly flashed by and vanished
behind them.

 
          
 
Hills began to emerge on the eastern horizon.
At first they were black lumps, then gray, then—as the Cadillac closed on them
at one hundred miles an hour—purple, their contours sharpening against the
sapphire sky.

 
          
 
Chuck pointed at what now loomed as mountains,
and he said simply, “In there."

 
          
 
"Where? What?" There was no “there"
there. The road seemed to plunge straight into the mountains. The Banner Clinic
was underground?
Preston
was damned if he'd spend a month in a cave.

 
          
 
But at the base of the nearest mountain the road
swooped to the right and snaked through a narrow pass between shoulders of
rust-red dirt.

 
          
 
Chuck flicked a finger toward a plateau atop
one of the hills. "See up there?"

 
          
 
Preston
saw
a sprawling white edifice of stone and glass, on which rays of the afternoon
sun played like a thousand restless fingers.

 
          
 
'That's Stone Banner's very own place. Got a
swimming pool, tennis court, three-hole golf course, the works. He calls it
Xanadu, like in Citizen Kane.'"

 
          
 
The road spilled them into an oasis of green
surrounded by the pastel hills. An automatic sprinkler system bathed sections
of
Bermuda
rye grass at programmed intervals. Stands
of palm trees offered shade to ducks floating on man-made ponds. A complex of
adobe buildings—beige with red tile roofs—hunkered in the middle of the oasis.
The road looped in toward the buildings, then out again, then made another loop
by an airstrip and continued on, to nowhere.

 
          
 
There were four adobe buildings, arranged in a
square. The largest fronted on the paved roundabout. Chuck stopped the limo at
the curb before a huge black-glass door, beside which, embedded in the adobe,
was a discreet brass plaque that said the banner clinic. He did not turn off
the motor but popped the trunk and got out.

 
          
 
Preston
followed. It was like stepping from a refrigerator into a sauna. The first
breath of hot air hurt his chilled lungs.

 
          
 
Chuck handed him his suitcase and said,
"I'd take you in, but I gotta hump back and collect a lady lawyer coming
in from
Pasadena
. 'Sides, you look like you can make it on
your own."

 
          
 
Preston
managed a smile. "I hope you make it back to the NFL."

 
          
 
"Not this pickaninny. I stray too far
from here, for sure I'll find me a snowdrift and stick my nose in it."

 
          
 
"Forever?"

 
          
 
''There's no such thing as forever, friend.
All I know for now is, I got to serve a life sentence saving my life."

 
          
 
Preston
suddenly felt ill. He let Chuck take his hand and shake it.

 
          
 
"Kick back and let it happen,” Chuck said
as he ducked into the car. "You feel like a sack of wet turtle turds now,
but believe me, when you get out of here, you'll feel like the prince of
fuckin' peace.”

 
          
 
Don’t leave!
Preston
wanted to shout. Take me with you! But all
he did was wave feebly as, at the helm of his great black clipper. Chuck receded
toward the distant pass.

 
          
 
He stood, suitcase in hand, as frightened and
forlorn as a thirteen-year-old on the threshold of boarding school—alone,
lonely, abandoned. His head ached. His stomach ached. And as he raised a hand
to wipe sweat from his brow, his fingers trembled before his eyes.

 
          
 
He turned and looked at the building. There
was nothing overtly menacing about it, no bars on the windows, no guards at the
door. But, he supposed, there had been nothing overtly menacing about
Treblinka, either.

 
          
 
He took a deep breath and a step toward the
door, then stopped at the sound of an engine approaching fast. Maybe it was
bringing another victim. Maybe they could pass together into the nether world.
He squinted into the lowering sun and saw a light-colored sedan roaring by the
airstrip. The heat rising off the macadam made the car appear to be a
hovercraft.

 
          
 
An emergency admission, he decided: a child
with a drug overdose, or a husband in critical withdrawal, or a wife with a
hemorrhaging ulcer.

 
          
 
The car was a big BMW, probably going 120, and
at the last moment before it would shoot by the entrance to the roundabout, its
brakes squealed, it careened to the left and almost lifted up onto two wheels
and shrieked to a jolting stop a few feet from
Preston
.

 
          
 
Preston
wished he wanted to help the panicked parents carry the stricken child into the
clinic, to offer a supporting shoulder and soothing words to the disoriented
husband or the exsanguinating wife. But he didn't. All he wanted to do was
dematerialize into the ether. So he stood aside.