Prelude to a Scream (19 page)

“Well if you think you're shocked, you should have seen little David's mother. He was naive about the crabs, at least. But that was about it for his naivet
é
. Anyway, before he got around to asking her to help him figure it out he was just about eaten up.”

Stanley smiled and took another sip of his whiskey. It was beginning to taste like he remembered it.

Cindy sighed. “For a while his mother went around thinking he and she might have been better off if he'd been born asexual, like his dad.”

“Sounds like he's making up for it.”

She smiled.

Stanley finished his drink. She moved to pour him another but he covered the glass with the flat of his hand. “Give me a bottled water. Any kind.”

She appeared not to think twice about it. She put the Bushmills back on the shelf and uncapped a bottle of Calistoga.

“Just the bottle's fine.”

She put the bottle on a fresh coaster and began to busy herself behind the bar.

“Caesar the Second,” he mused, watching her wash a couple of glasses. “You called him that?”

She shrugged. More freckles. “He was paying the bills, at the time.”

Stanley whistled softly. “You look great.”

She didn't blush. “Thanks.”

“You're too nice to be working here.”

“Are you crazy? I take a grand a week cash out of this place. What's wrong with that? You think maybe I should get rid of the train?”

Stanley glanced at the brunette at the other end of the bar.

Cindy draped the dish towel over a faucet and laughed. “Plus it beats hell out of that fly-speck town I started out in.”

“Where's that?”

“New Mexico.”

“Where abouts?”

“Little place called Kiva Junction.”

“I have to admit…”

“You never heard of it.”

“Pretty country, wherever it is, in that state.”

“Not to propagate the myth, but there's nothing in that pretty country but cowboys and livestock and the pickup trucks they both ride around in.”

“What's wrong with cowboys?”

“Everything.”

“They're hetero, aren't they?”

“Who isn't?”

Stanley raised an eyebrow. “How long have you been in San Francisco?”

“Long enough,” she said. She narrowed her eyes. “What do you mean? Is there a lot of queers in San Francisco? Where? Show me one.”

Three people came in and took stools at the middle of the bar. Cindy went back to work.

Stanley worried the bottle of water for a while.

“Donna”, Cindy had heard Ted call the brunette.

Donna Vivienne Carneval, did Stanley think? Portuguese and Swedish, did he think?

He stood off the bar stool, picked up the bottle of water, and limped down the bar. Reaching the corner to the left of the front door, he stopped to study the playlist on the jukebox. If nothing else came of it, maybe he could do something about the music in this place.

The machine took only paper money. Singles, fives, tens and, incredibly enough, twenties. Why not C-notes? If you're going to go to all the trouble to build a jukebox that only takes paper money, you might as well think big. To pass the time he fed it the most mangled single he had. The machine sucked it up as ergonomically as a junkyard dog inhales a Vienna sausage. He punched an alphanumeric without thinking. A digital display thanked him.

Why is it, Stanley wondered, as the jukebox sorted through its CDs, that these buck-eaters in bars will take any kind of wrinkled, twisted, or spavined bill at all, while a machine in a BART station or laundromat won't accept any but the most recently minted, if not ironed or dry-cleaned, tender?

He propped the bottle on top of the jukebox and pretended to get serious about a Rod Stewart selection. Donna and Ted were sitting directly behind him, close enough that he could hear both their voices.

“I guess that makes the human body capital-intensive,” Ted was saying.

That's good, Ted, thought Stanley. You tape, I'll mud.

“Resource-intensive,” Donna corrected him. “Take the United States, for instance. The United States makes a lot of claims about a free-market economy based on tremendous industrial and intellectual resources. But in fact it is a heavily resource-intensive economy. Or was, we should say.”

The jukebox had begun to play the blindly selected tune. It was called
I'm Proud To Be An American
, and, as it caterwauled its nationalistic thesis, everyone in the bar realized that the guy with a slight limp drinking water by the jukebox must be the idiot who just spent a dollar on this truly awful song. Not a very efficient way to eavesdrop. Stanley raised his bottle of water in a mute toast to the bar behind him without taking his eyes off the playlists.

Ted Nichols shot an annoyed glance over his shoulder as he said to Donna, “Was?”

“Sure,” she continued. “Was. The fish are gone, the trees are going. Copper, coal and other minerals are played out. Oil we can get, but at what environmental cost? We make a lot of noise about South America exploiting her natural resources, but all we really care about is inhibiting competition.”

“But it doesn't make any difference.”

“Correct. Soon enough our natural resources are going to be practically exhausted, and our civilization will be in the same relative fix as Europe, China, Iraq, or any other older, resource-exhausted country. We'll be buying everything we need from the developing countries. The balance of trade is biased 21% against us already.” She paused to watch Ted sip his beer. “Ever heard of the Yellow River in China? Also known as the Hwang Ho?”

“Sure.”

“Particularly the middle course, in the Shansi and Shensi Provinces, but mainly in the Honan Province — right?”

Did she mean Hu Nan? wondered Stanley, flipping past the Clint Black catalogue. You say Honan, I say Hu Nan, let's call the kidney Off. Les Paul and Mary Ford?

“Um…,” said Ted.

“Just say yes,” Donna said.

“Sure. Okay, yes. Have you been there?”

“I have. But that's beside the point. The river's 3,000 miles long — that's the width of the continental U.S. Know why they call it the Yellow?”

“Ah… Because it's yellow?”

“Right in one. Know why it's yellow?”

Ted shook his head.

“An honest man. The river is yellow because it's full of topsoil, which is washed into the river by torrential seasonal rains that assault the watershed drained by the river.”

“Do tell,” said Ted, filling his mouth with beer.

“There's more. It's even to the point.”

“It's your point,” said Ted, carefully setting his glass on the bar.

That's interesting, thought Stanley. I can hear it in his voice. His tone says,
Why don't you leave me alone?
and,
I
don't come here to solve the world's problems
. How's she going to handle that?

“The river drains so much topsoil because there's nothing to check erosion on the slopes of the watershed. Why do you think that is?”

“Lady, I don't come here to think.”

“A spokesman for the race.”

“So what prevents the topsoil from draining into the Yellow River?” Ted replied tiredly, with such disinterest that a stranger might have assumed Donna and Ted as married ten years already.

“Nothing. That's the point.”

“But how much topsoil can there be?”

“Another interesting point.”

“So?”

“Trees.”

“Trees? Trees… I saw a tree just recently. Now where…? Yes. It was a big lone evergreen job in the lower Haight. I was rocking this used-clothing store…”

“What kind of lone evergreen?”

“How should I know?”

“God this song is awful.”

Donna's rueful glance at Stanley's back caused his scar to crawl. “Patriotism's a lonesome business-like thing to do,” she said.

Ted raised his glass. “Somebody's got to do it.”

“Yeah.” They toasted.

As Donna demurely sipped her Tom Collins, Ted drained his beer and signaled Cindy for another.

The song finished. While Stanley searched for a new selection an awkward silence lengthened at the bar.

“So what about this topsoil?” Ted finally croaked, standing off his stool to fish cash out of his jeans.

“Well, this topsoil has been draining into the Yellow River and making it yellow ever since a very specific event.”

“Which was?” Sorting through a modest wad of bills, Ted suddenly tapped Stanley's shoulder with a folded single. “Hey buddy,” he said, rather thickly. “Here's a buck. Play something decent.”

“Sure, baby,” said Stanley brightly, snatching the bill without turning around. “Any requests?”

“Something decent.”

“Which was, the cutting down of the last tree in the watershed,” continued Green Eyes.

Cindy put a beer in front of Ted.

“The last tree in the… You mean, there are no trees in the watershed of the Yellow River?” Ted picked up his glass and set it down again, half empty.

“Correct. As I said before, the Yellow's 3,000 miles long, and it drains something like three-quarters of a million square miles.”

“You're telling me there's no trees in 750,000 square miles? What's the place look like?”

Mars, Stanley thought, punching up David Bowie.

“Mars,” said Donna. “It's very beautiful, actually. Kind of morbidly fascinating.”

“There must have been trees there at some time.”

“Oh, there were. That's the point. The central course of the river was entirely forested. The forests had a lot to do with why Honan Province was the seat of the ancient Chinese civilization. Buildings, heat, doors, furniture — like that.”

“Hey,” said Ted, reaching out to touch Donna's forearm. “It was the days before sheetrock.”

“Yes,” she said, faking a laugh. “The halcyon days.”

Ted walked his fingers to the inside of her elbow. “So what happened?”

“The Chinese cut them all down.”

“When?”

She shivered and looked at Ted's fingers, which had almost reached her shoulder. “When they were resource-intensive.”

“When was that?”

“The earliest records keeping track of the river's doings date back to the third millennium, B.C.”

“Jesus…”

“About the same time as Iraq.”

Ted was picking it up. “Back when Iraq was… What did they call Iraq before, you know, before they called it Iraq?”

The Garden of Eden, thought Stanley. At last: Roy Orbison,
I'm Falling
. Q-32.

“Paradise,” Donna said.

Ted looked deep into her eyes. “The Garden of Eden?”

“That's what they called it.”

“Have they called it that lately?”

“No. Not lately. Even Saddam Hussein hasn't called Iraq the Garden of Eden lately. The garden part is now a vast marshland.”

“You been there, too? To paradise, I mean?”

“Yes.”

“But I haven't?”

“No,” she smiled. “Not yet.”

Ted nearly drained a full glass of beer.

“Which is the point.”

Stanley suddenly realized that Ted and most of Donna were almost perfectly reflected in the glass encasing the playlists in the jukebox. He watched Ted squeeze his eyes closed with the fingers of one hand, then squint at ‘Donna' from beneath the shade of its palm. Ted was a tired man. “But of course… So the big question is…” Ted sighed wearily. “What
was
the point?”

“You said it was to get drunk and put some moves on me.”

“I said that? We don't have to get drunk. I would like… But no, really, this is… interesting. Your arm is… soft. What was the point? I forget.”

“We were talking about the fragility of resource-intensive economies.”

“Ah. No wonder I forgot.”

“Ever read a book called
At the Edge of History
, by G. Irwin Thompson?”

One play left. Instead of punching it up, Stanley watched the reflected Ted lower his hand to his glass, pick it up, up-end it, set it down empty. Maybe Ted really was trying to keep up with her, but it was obvious that his interest was cooking down to a good night's sleep. A recalcitrant pigeon for Donna.