The Shaft (27 page)

    'Maybe she's having an affair,' Jonathan said. 'Buying you presents to share the wealth.'

    That squeezed a patronizing laugh out of his big friend. 'Or maybe she caught a case of multiple personality, and right now I'm living with Nice Cammy. Soon the Evil Anti-Cammy will manifest in a fart cloud of sulphur dioxide. I don't know which personality fucked me last night, but I will confide one lurid detail, no more: I think we should phone the Guinness Book, or Believe It Or Not!, because she banged me like a bullet train. I could barely hang on/ His broad Ed Norton grin levelled off. There was some other tasty bit he was keeping to himself. 'More coffee for you?'

    By now Jonathan knew Bash's pattern.
A peekaboo shot of sexual minutiae, just betwixt me and thee, pal o' mine
. Behind the crude honesty he was hiding something else. He wanted Jonathan to know he was getting laid, but not the Bad Thing. There was something Jonathan was going to have to drag out of him. Jonathan decided to change the subject entirely, kidding himself that he was sparing Bash some embarrassment.

    'Can't do me a Turbo here, can you?' A beer might go down better, but no, not here at work, dude.

    Bash had hoisted the Pyrex pot, trying to see how high he could hold it and still hit his mug with a steaming arc of Colombian Supremo. When he finished, with a flourish as always, his cuffs were spattered and his coffee had a head on it.

    The stuff was good, potent, newly brewed. To Jonathan it tasted like spitoonage.

    He hit the bathroom and inventoried the melanotic bags under his eyes. They were puffy and insisted on some quality sleep time. He hesitated, bit his lip, and pulled the straw of cocaine out of his shirt pocket. He'd bent it double to fit it less obtrusively and the paper elbow had split, depositing a good two lines or so in the crease of his pocket. He did not care. He tapped out a pinch on the ridge of his hand, feeling like Dr Jekyll on the verge of quaffing his tainted potion. Stevenson had written
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
in the 1880s, probably during his cocaine treatments for tuberculosis.

    
Let's see if the booster rocket hype of this stuff is all it's cracked up to be,
he thought.
Cracked. Ha-ha
, he was wielding the jargon like a pro now, even making puns out of it.

    Under cover of running water in the sink, he did two healthy toots and flushed the rest, straw and all, down the toilet. He washed his hands, dabbed at his mouth and face, then inhaled small jolts of water up his nose the way Jamaica had told him to.

    It took ninety seconds for the hyperdrive to kick in, the way a tank of nitrous oxide can supercharge a race car. He remembered everything that needed doing, without using memos. He dive-bombed his work stack, polishing it off along with eight more cups of coffee.

    'Never heard you hum music while you work before,' Bash said.

    Jonathan laughed and shrugged it off. He could handle this land of efficiency, for sure.

    This was easy to get to like.

    The sight of Camela's new engagement diamond, over dinner, brought on a depression of Shakespearian overstatement. Jonathan found his gaze morbidly affixed to the ring that glinted from her betrothal finger. He stared blankly, not meaning to, the way ministers stare at a woman's breasts.

    With his newsboy's cap on, Bash looked like a twelve-year-old with the world's most overactive thyroid.

    Dinner was tarragon chicken with lots of fresh vegetables, a salad of butter lettuce with julienne bell pepper and jicama. Dessert was wide-topped goblets full of sliced strawberries in chocolated whipped cream. Bash marked Jonathan's oblique hold on the evening, sensed that a serious interview would come later, and otherwise ignored his friend's discomfort with a breezy, studied indifference.

    Together they watched a rental tape of
Amazon Women on the Moon
. Camela laughed in all the right places. At ten she grandly excused herself, as she said, to 'retire.' She had worn a one-piece velvet wraparound with a plunging neckline and a broad, fancy belt. She had done the alterations and padded the shoulders herself, and in sum the outfit was meant to impress, showing off the assets of her resurging figure and expertly camouflaging the areas still chalked for restoration.

    Bash laughed loud and long - at the movie, at Jonathan's occasional wisecracks, at nearly goddamn everything, reaching too hard to prove he was having a good time. He worked his way through a six pack of Quietly Beer, alternating with double-spiked Turbos, and determinedly crunched up at least fifty fortune cookies.

    Hang on to your ideals. A man is known by his deeds.

    Once Jonathan heard the fan come on in the bedroom, he scooted closer to Bash on the sofa, speaking low. 'Okay, man, just what the fuck is going on here?'

    'Zit look like?' Bash was half-bagged.

    'Just a couple of days ago you were shoveling shit about how Bash plus Camela equalled no way, Jose. If she'd have aimed that gold at my eyes any more I would've gotten sunstroke. Looks like your weekend was pretty goddamn eventful too, stud.'

    Bash waved a hand dismissively, sloshing the contents of his half-empty Quiedy bottle into foam. 'Did I ever tell you why Cammy came to Chicago? Not just to waste her life jumping from one idiot secretarial gig to another.'

    'You told me you guys linked up after her fiance dumped her.'

    'Ahum. Well, the nub of our gist, chilluns, is this: She stays poor and on her own as long as she stays single. Her mission, Jimbo, should she decide to accept it, is to return to Mommy and Daddy in Iowa, how shall we say, spoused.' His Louisiana accent came out of hiding and made every other word strange and new-sounding, drowned in noble deep-South honeydew. 'Spoused. Then Mommy and Daddy give her the three-bedroom in the moneybelt suburbs, two matching Volvos, and one whole year to honeymoon wherever their one and only's heart desires.' He said
dee-czars
.

    'What are her parents into?' Jonathan had begun fiddling with Bash's modified Magic 8-Ball.

    'Computer keyboard manufacture. Third largest in America.' He was startitag to have difficulty with the harder consonants, and took a shot at rinsing the blur from his speech with a slug of Quietly swished around like mouthwash. 'Now your ordinary mortals might opine: Geez, guy, you're kinda selling out, ain'tcha?'

    'That crossed my mind, yeah.'

    'You got it. Invasion of the Mega-Butt Peoples. But just between you 'n' me, Jonathan… I am thirty-fucking-four-fucking years old, this year. And you know what? I think I could use a year off, bought and paid for. And I think there ain't nothing you can do by marriage that you can't undo by divorce.'

    The 8-Ball's two cents worth surfaced: Bite My Packed Shorts.

    Bash sounded morbid and ingrown, craving exterior reassurances for his less than noble charter. Jonathan felt clear-headed, able-bodied and in control - like he'd felt in the wake of his premier blast of toot-sweet - but very tired, very old. He patted the nearest of Bash's sloping shoulders and felt knots.

    'Hey, man, it isn't for me to vote yea or nay. I mean, just look at how fucked up my life is-'

    Bash nailed him, shiny-eyed. 'Don't start that shit about Amanda again. I ain't in no mood, bro.'

    'I wasn't going to.'

    'You were. Fucking were.' He drew breath faster, a bull pawing and snorting, amping toward charge and crush and bright gushings of crimson. 'Man, when are you going to just admit that Amanda… all that pain and bullshit you put yourself through… is just… '

    'Shh, cool it, just calm down, okay?' It was scary to see Bash in such a state - defanged, unboisterous, less than positive. Like lifting Apollo's toga and finding a pea pod penis, below even human average.

    'Listen to me. Maybe it's you, Bash-man. Maybe you did it, helped make Camela better, or helped her get closer to her own optimum vision of herself. That's not a bad thing. Jesus- so you might have helped somebody; how could that be bad? You sure as hell have helped me more times than I deserve. I might have taken the high dive years ago if you hadn't been around. My other so-called fucking friends sure faded into the baseboards; to hell with 'em. You told me you'd be there for me and the difference was that you were. And friends don't ever tell friends that. They tell everybody else, at funerals, when it's too late and it doesn't matter a damn.'

    Jonathan knew he was babbling, stringing phrases, grabbing for superficial logic. But his performance had enough surface tension to keep Bash from slopping over into big, ripe tears. If for some reason he started crying, Jonathan was afraid they'd both lose it.

    'But I'm here because you gave a shit, man, and so I'm here to tell you right now that your life is yours. And if you want my opinion, it's yours, and if you don't, that's fine too. I'll defend whatever you decide, because I love you, man. Anything else is just a fix. Right?'

    Bash swallowed and nodded. Jonathan was unaware whether he had just done any good, or which of them was more purged. The emotion passed with the moment, and ten minutes later Bash had slumped into the corner crook of the sofa and was snoring softly.

    Jonathan pursed his lips. No use in talking to his knees, or his hands. Masturbation was out. The dinner dishes had already been done. Efficiently, too.

    He whispered into the kitchen phone, tip-toed to the door, and caught a cab back to Kenilworth. When he stepped into the fresh snowpack the night cold hit his bare face as hard as a swung plank. He brought the depression home with him. It was more than clinical; it was classic, settling its weight onto his spine and belaboring his temples like an invisible cartoon stormfront. The blue triangle hovering in the mystic fluid of Bash's magic 8-Ball stayed with Jonathan, too. He saw it bumping against the round window and thought of a corpse floating up to the porthole of a sunken ship.

    
Kill Yourself, Slug Snot.

    The funk refused to dissipate. He needed sleep. He overpaid the cabbie and slumped inside to find some.

    

    

    Late night in Oakwood.

    Edgar Ransome heard the taxi's snow treads mashing through street slush. When the car door chunked shut outside his ground floor window he parted the eastward drapes for a look-see. He was Kenilworth Arms' unofficial sentry-without-portfolio, and his vigilance permitted him to maintain a passing mock of security. He did his part, though no one else ever suspected. His vision was crackeijack: he could see individual motes of backed-up dust sifting floorward from the disturbed curtains, even the white lines of dry dermis delineating the print pad of the finger he used to part them. He memo'ed the identity of the cab's passenger as one of those new kids from upstairs, the one who had moved in a day or three ago.

    From the ground floor Edgar was privy to the comings and goings of the night. Since Fergus - the joke that called himself a manager - was aloof, unconcerned, probably brain dead, Edgar's role of watchdog was self-assigned. He felt he helped prevent Kenilworth from actually becoming as seedy as it already looked.

    When he had been younger, he had been called Edder - short for Eddie R. - by nearly everyone. His keen eyes and powerhouse right arm buttressed his fantasy of one day becoming a baseball pitcher for the majors. He favored the Cubs. During World War Two he organized pick-up scratch lot teams among other Army Air Corps guys whenever they weren't being noisomely unbunked in the dark to go dump bombs on Berlin. His wartime parachute jump over friendly waters - abandoning a lame Liberator that decided to start losing gas and hydraulic fluid like a runny nose - brought him a Purple Heart for a busted hip and membership in the Caterpillar Club. His caterpillar pin had green eyes. If you chuted out over enemy territory during wartime, you got one with red eyes, and most likely an Air Medal to boot.

    Television tonight had been the usual hash - sexless fitness nuts anguishing over junior high school crises. Now, The Equalizer, there was a program Edgar enjoyed. It depicted a protagonist in advanced middle age, a grandfather almost, who was strong, sexy, proficient and lucid. One of these days, Edgar thought, it would be nice to purchase a videotape deck so he'd never miss an episode. Indeed, he could save up the ones he'd already viewed. Build a library. When current technology didn't disgust him, it still enthralled him. So many buttons that could be pushed.

    At 73, Edgar had outlived two wives, these being the only two women he had ever spent the night with in his life. Mae Lynn was the first, and he had never really fallen out of love with her; he'd been doomed, thunderstruck from the moment they'd met as teenagers. She saw him off to war and was waiting for him when he returned from the European Theatre. She had been taken by a violent series of sledgehammer heart attacks; he had watched her die on the day before Thanksgiving, 1965.

    His marriage to Glenda had followed within nine months. He needed someone else in the house, someone to relate to over morning coffee, someone to run errands for and react with. No disrespect to Mae Lynn was ever intended. The union with Glenda took a decade to fall apart, and by the time she died of uterine cancer they were only speaking to each other about once a year.

    Since then, Edgar had become a sort of caretaker, watching his friends die. His enemies died too. He settled on trying to make no attachments. Emotional involvement only brought you sorrow when death came to thieve its due. He came to see those who populated his life as biological mishaps. Skinbags with too many factory defects. Ticking time-bombs of death strung like deadly jewels along a time-line of mortared arteries, burst hearts, blown joints, blood more like venom, clots and arthritis, ulcerations and assassinating, infections, sundered bones, exhausted organs and ruined minds. First feeble, then helpless, then dead. Dead as granite, dead as dreams.