8

On his way over to Bob Arctor's house, where a bunch of heads could usually be found for a mellow turned-on time, Charles Freck worked out a gag to put ol' Barris on, to pay him back for the spleen jive at the Fiddler's Three restaurant that day. In his head, as he skillfully avoided the radar traps that the police kept everywhere (the police radar vans checking out drivers usually took the disguise of old raunchy VW vans, painted dull brown, driven by bearded freaks; when he saw such vans he slowed), he ran a preview fantasy number of his put-on:

FRECK: (Casually) I bought a methedrine plant today.

BARRIS: (With a snotty expression on his face) Methedrine is a benny, like speed; it's crank, it's crystal, it's amphetamine, it's made synthetically in a lab. So it isn't organic, like pot. There's no such thing as a methedrine plant like there is a pot plant.

FRECK: (Springing the punch line on him) I mean I inherited forty thousand from an uncle and purchased a plant hidden in this dude's garage where he makes methedrine. I mean, he's got a factory there where he manufactures meth. Plant in the sense of—

He couldn't get it phrased exactly right as he drove, because part of his mind stayed on the vehicles around him and the lights; but he knew when he got to Bob's house he'd lay it on Barris super good. And, especially if a bunch of people were there, Barris would rise to the bait and be visible to everyone flat-out as a clear and evident asshole. And that would super pay him back, because Barris worse than anybody else couldn't stand to be made fun of.

When he pulled up he found Barris outdoors working on Bob Arctor's car. The hood was up, and both Barris and Arctor stood together with a pile of car tools.

"Hey, man," Freck said, slamming his door and sauntering casually over. "Barris," he said right off in a cool way, putting his hand on Barris's shoulder to attract his attention.

"Later," Barris growled. He had his repair clothes on; grease and like that covered the already dirty fabric.

Freck said, "I bought a methedrine plant today."

With an impatient scowl, Barris said, "How big?"

"What do you mean?"

"How big a plant?"

"Well," Freck said, wondering how to go on.

"How much'd you pay for it?" Arctor said, also greasy from the car repair. They had the carb off, Freck saw, air filter, hoses, and all.

Freck said, "About ten bucks."

"Jim could have gotten it for you cheaper," Arctor said, resuming his labors. "Couldn't you, Jim?"

"They're practically giving meth plants away," Barris said.

"This is a whole fucking garage!" Freck protested. "A factory! It turns out a million tabs a day—the pill-rolling machinery and everything. Everything!"

"All that cost ten dollars?" Barris said, grinning widely.

"Where's it located?" Arctor said.

"Not around here," Freck said uneasily. "Hey, fuck it, you guys."

Pausing in his work—Barris did a lot of pausing in his work, whether anyone was talking to him or not—Barris said, "You know, Freck, if you drop or shoot too much meth you start talking like Donald Duck."

"So?" Freck said.

"Then nobody can understand you," Barris said.

Arctor said, "What'd you say, Barris? I couldn't understand you."

His face dancing with merriment, Barris made his voice sound like Donald Duck's. Freck and Arctor grinned and enjoyed it. Barris went on and on, gesturing finally at the carburetor.

"What about the carburetor?" Arctor said, not smiling now.

Barris, in his regular voice, but still grinning widely, said, "You've got a bent choke shaft. The whole carb should be rebuilt. Otherwise the choke's going to shut on you while you're driving along the freeway and then you'll find your motor is flooded and dead and some asshole will rear-end you. And possibly in addition that raw gas washing down the cylinder walls—if it goes on long enough—will wash the lubrication away, so your cylinders will be scored and permanently damaged. And then you'll need them rebored."

"Why is the choke rod bent?" Arctor asked.

Shrugging, Barris resumed taking apart the carb, he did not answer. He left that up to Arctor and to Charles Freck, who knew nothing about engines, especially complex repairs like this.

Coming out of the house, Luckman, wearing a snazzy shirt and tight high-style Levi jeans, carrying a book and wearing shades, said, "I phoned and they're checking to see what a rebuilt carb will set you back for this car. They'll phone in a while, so I left the front door open."

Barris said, "You could put a four-barrel on instead of this two, while you're at it. But you'd have to put on a new manifold. We could pick up a used one for not very much."

"It would idle too high," Luckman said, "with like a Rochester four-barrel—is that what you mean? And it wouldn't shift properly. It wouldn't upshift."

"The idling jets could be replaced with smaller jets," Barris said, "that would compensate. And with a tach he could watch his rpms, so it didn't over-rev. He'd know by the tach when it wasn't upshifting. Usually just backing off on the gas pedal causes it to upshift if the automatic linkage to the transmission doesn't do it. I know where we can get a tach, too. In fact, I have one."

"Yeah," Luckman said, "well, if he tromped down heavy on the step-down passing gear to get a lot of torque suddenly in an emergency on the freeway, it'd downshift and rev up so high it'd blow the head gasket or worse, a lot worse. Blow up the whole engine."

Barris, patiently, said, "He'd see the tach needle jump and he'd back right off."

"While passing?" Luckman said. "Halfway past a fucking big semi? Shit, he'd have to keep barreling on, high revs or not; he'd have to blow up the engine rather than back off, because if he backed off he'd never get around what he was trying to pass."

"Momentum," Barris said. "In a car this heavy, momentum would carry him on by even if he backed off."

"What about uphill?" Luckman said. "Momentum doesn't carry you very far uphill when you're passing."

To Arctor, Barris said, "What does this car …" He bent to see what make it was. "This …" His lips moved. "Olds."

"It weighs about a thousand pounds," Arctor said. Charles Freck saw him wink toward Luckman.

"You're right, then," Barris agreed. "There wouldn't be much inertia mass at that light weight. Or would there?" He groped for a pen and something to write on. "A thousand pounds traveling at eighty miles an hour builds up force equal to—"

"That's a thousand pounds," Arctor put in, "with the passengers in it and with a full tank of gas and a big carton of bricks in the trunk."

"How many passengers?" Luckman said, deadpan.

"Twelve."

"Is that six in back," Luckman said, "and six in—"

"No," Arctor said, "that's eleven in back and the driver sitting alone in front. So, you see, so there will be more weight on the rear wheels for more traction. So it won't fishtail."

Barris glanced alertly up. "This car fishtails?"

"Unless you get eleven people riding in the back," Arctor said.

"Be better, then, to lead the trunk with sacks of sand," Barris said. "Three two-hundred-pound sacks of sand. Then the passengers could be distributed more evenly and they would be more comfortable."

"What about one six-hundred-pound box of gold in the trunk?" Luckman asked him. "Instead of three two-hundred—"

"Will you lay off?" Barris said. "I'm trying to calculate the inertial force of this car traveling at eighty miles an hour."

"It won't go eighty," Arctor said. "It's got a dead cylinder. I meant to tell you. It threw a rod last night, on my way home from the 7-11."

"Then why are we pulling the carb?" Barris demanded. "We have to pull the whole head for that. In fact, much more. In fact, you may have a cracked block. Well, that's why it won't start."

"Won't your car start?" Freck asked Bob Arctor.

"It won't start," Luckman said, "because we pulled the carb off."

Puzzled, Barris said, "Why'd we pull the carb? I forget."

"To get all the springs and little dinky parts replaced," Arctor said. "So it won't fuck up again and nearly kill us. The Union station mechanic advised us to."

"If you bastards wouldn't rappity-rap on," Barris said, "like a lot of speed freaks, I could complete my computations and tell you how this particular car with its weight would handle with a four-barrel Rochester carb, modified naturally with smaller idling jets." He was genuinely sore now. "So SHUT UP!"

Luckman opened the book he was carrying. He puffed up, then, to much larger than usual; his great chest swelled, and so did his biceps. "Barris, I'm going to read to you." He began to read from the book, in a particularly fluent way. " ‘He to whom it is given to see Christ more real than any other reality …' "

"What?" Barris said.

Luckman continued reading. " ‘… than any other reality in the World, Christ everywhere present and everywhere growing more great, Christ the final determination and plasmatic Principle of the Universe—' "

"What is that?" Arctor said.

"Chardin. Teilhand de Chardin."

"Jeez, Luckman," Arctor said.

" ‘… that man indeed lives in a zone where no multiplicity can distress him and which is nevertheless the most active workshop of universal fulfilment.' " Luckman shut the book.

With a high degree of apprehension, Charles Freck moved in between Barris and Luckman. "Cool it, you guys."

"Get out of the way, Freck," Luckman said, bringing back his right arm, low, for a vast sweeping haymaken at Barris. "Come on, Barris, I'm going to coldcock you into tomorrow, for talking to your betters like that."

With a bleat of wild, appealing terror, Barris dropped his felt pen and pad of paper and scuttled off erratically toward the open front door of the house, yelling back as he ran, "I hear the phone about the rebuilt carb."

They watched him go.

"I was just kidding him," Luckman said, rubbing his lower lip.

"What if he gets his gun and silencer?" Freck said, his nervousness off the scale entirely. He moved by degrees in the direction of his own parked car, to drop swiftly behind it if Barris reappeared firing.

"Come on," Arctor said to Luckman; they fell back together into their car work, while Freck loitered apprehensively by his own vehicle, wondering why he had decided to bop over here today. It had no mellow quality today, here, none at all, as it usually did. He had sensed the bad vibes under the kidding right from the start. What's the motherfuck wrong? he wondered, and got back somberly into his own car, to start it up.

Are things going to get heavy and bad here too, he wondered, like they did at Jerry Fabin's house during the last few weeks with him? It used to be mellow here, he thought, everybody kicking back and turning on, grooving to acid rock, especially the Stones. Donna sitting here in her leather jacket and boots, filling caps, Luckman rolling joints and telling about the seminar he planned to give at UCLA in dope-smoking and joint-rolling, and how someday he'd suddenly roll the perfect joint and it would be placed under glass and helium back at Constitution Hall, as part of American history with those other items of similar importance. When I look back, he thought, even to when Jim Barris and I were sitting at the Fiddler's, the other day … it was better even then. Jenny began it, he thought; that's what's coming down here, that there which carried off Jerry. How can days and happenings and moments so good become so quickly ugly, and for no reason, for no real reason? Just—change. With nothing causing it.

"I'm splitting," he said to Luckman and Arctor, who were watching him rev up.

"No, stay, hey, man," Luckman said with a warm smile. "We need you. You're a brother."

"Naw, I'm cutting out."

From the house Barris appeared cautiously. He carried a hammer. "It was a wrong number," he shouted, advancing with great caution, halting and peering like a crab-thing in a drive-in movie.

"What's the hammer for?" Luckman said.

Arctor said, "To fix the engine."

"Thought I would bring it with me," Barris explained as he returned gingerly to the Olds, "since I was indoors and noticed it."

"The most dangerous kind of person," Arctor said, "is one who is afraid of his own shadow." That was the last Freck heard as he drove away; he pondered over what Arctor meant, if he meant him, Charles Freck. He felt shame. But shit, he thought, why stick around when it's such a super bummer? Where's the chicken in that? Don't never participate in no bad scenes, he reminded himself; that was his motto in life. So he drove away now, without looking back. Let them snuff each other, he thought. Who needs them? But he felt bad, really bad, to leave them and to have witnessed the darkening change, and he wondered again why, and what it signified, but then it occurred to him that maybe things would go the other way again and get better, and that cheered him. In fact, it caused him to roll a short fantasy number in his head as he drove along avoiding invisible police cars:

THERE THEY ALL SAT AS BEFORE.

Even people who were either dead or burned out, like Jerry Fabin. They all sat here and there in a sort of clear white light, which wasn't daylight but better light than that, a kind of sea which lay beneath them and above them as well.

Donna and a couple other chicks looked so foxy—they had on halters and hot pants, or tank tops with no bras. He could hear music although he could not quite distinguish what track it was from what LP. Maybe Hendrix! he thought. Yeah, an old Hendrix track, or now all at once it was J.J. All of them: Jim Croce, and J.J., but especially Hendrix. "Before I die," Hendrix was murmuring, "let me live my life as I want to," and then immediately the fantasy number blew up because he had forgotten both that Hendrix was dead and how Hendrix and also Joplin had died, not to mention Croce. Hendrix and J.mJ. OD'ing on smack, both of them, two neat cool fine people like that, two outrageous humans, and he remembered how he'd heard that Janis's manager had only allowed her a couple hundred bucks now and then; she couldn't have the rest, all that she earned, because of her junk habit. And then he heard in his head her song "All Is Loneliness," and he began to cry. And in that condition drove on toward home.

In his living room, sitting with his friends and attempting to determine whether he needed a new carb, a rebuilt carb, or a modification carb-and-manifold, Robert Arctor sensed the silent constant scrutiny, the electronic presence, of the holoscanners. And felt good about it.

"You look mellow," Luckman said. "Putting out a hundred bucks wouldn't make me mellow."

"I decided to cruise along the street until I come across an Olds like mine," Arctor explained, "and then unbolt their carb and pay nothing. Like everyone else we know."

"Especially Donna," Barris said in agreement. "I wish she hadn't been in here the other day while we were gone. Donna steals everything she can carry, and if she can't carry it she phones up her rip-off gang buddies and they show up and carry it off for her."

"I'll tell you a stony I heard about Donna," Luckman said. "One time, see, Donna put a quarter into one of those automatic stamp machines that operate off a coil of stamps, and the machine was dingey and just kept cranking out stamps. Finally she had a marketbasket full. It still kept cranking them out. Ultimately she had like—she and her ripoff friends counted them—over eighteen thousand U.S. fifteen-cent stamps. Well, that was cool, except what was Donna Hawthorne going to do with them? She never wrote a letter in her life, except to her lawyer to sue some guy who burned her in a dope deal."

"Donna does that?" Arctor said. "She has an attorney to use in a default on an illegal transaction? How can she do that?"

"She just probably says the dude owes her bread."

"Imagine getting an angry pay-up-or-go-to-court letter from an attorney about a dope deal," Arctor said, marveling at Donna, as he frequently did.

"Anyhow," Luckman continued, "there she was with a marketbasket full of at least eighteen thousand U.S. fifteen-cent stamps, and what the hell to do with them? You can't sell them back to the Post Office. Anyhow, when the P.O. came to service the machine they'd know it went dingey, and anyone who showed up at a window with all those fifteen-cent stamps, especially a coil of them—shit, they'd flash on it; in fact, they'd be waiting for Donna, right? So she thought about it—after of course she'd loaded the coil of stamps into her MG and drove off—and then she phoned up more of those rip-off freaks she works with and had them drive over with a jackhammer of some kind, water-cooled and water-silenced, a real kinky special one which, Christ, they ripped off, too, and they dug the stamp machine loose from the concrete in the middle of the night and carried it to her place in the back of a Ford Ranchero. Which they also probably ripped off. For the stamps."

"You mean she sold the stamps?" Arctor said, marveling. "From a vending machine? One by one?"

"They remounted—this is what I heard, anyhow—they relocated the U.S. stamp machine at a busy intersection where a lot of people pass by, but back out of sight where no mail truck would spot it, and they put it back in operation."

"They would have been wiser just to knock over the coin box," Barris said.

"So they were selling stamps, then," Luckman said, "for like a few weeks until the machine ran out, like it naturally had to eventually. And what the fuck next? I can imagine Donna's brain working on that during those weeks, that peasant-thrift brain … her family is peasant stock from some European country. Anyhow, by the time it ran out of its coil, Donna had decided to convert it over to soft drinks, which are from the P.O.—they're really guarded. And you go into the bucket forever for that."

"Is this true?" Barris said.

"Is what true?" Luckman said.

Barris said, "That girl is disturbed. She should be forcibly committed. Do you realize that all our taxes were raised by her stealing those stamps?" He sounded angry again.

"Write the government and tell them," Luckman said, his face cold with distaste for Barris. "Ask Donna for a stamp to mail it; she'll sell you one."

"At full price," Barris said, equally mad.

The holos, Arctor thought, will have miles and miles of this on their expensive tapes. Not miles and miles of dead tape but miles and miles of tripped out tape.

It was not what went on while Robert Arctor sat before a holo-scanner that mattered so much, he considered; it was what took place—at least for him … for whom? … for Fred—while Bob Arctor was elsewhere or asleep and others were within scanning range. So I should split, he thought, as I planned it out, leaving these guys, and sending other people I know over here. I should make my house super-accessible from now on.

And then a dreadful, ugly thought rose inside him. Suppose when I play the tapes back I see Donna when she's in here—opening a window with a spoon or knife blade—and slipping in and destroying my possessions and stealing. Another Donna: the chick as she really is, or anyhow as she is when I can't see her. The philosophical "when a tree falls in the forest" number. What is Donna like when no one is around to watch her?

Does, he wondered, the gentle lovely shrewd and very kind, superkind girl transform herself instantly into something sly? Will I see a change which will blow my mind? Donna on Luckman, anyone I care about. Like your pet cat or dog when you're out of the house … the cat empties a pillowcase and starts stuffing your valuables in it: electric clock and bedside radio, shaver, all it can stuff in before you get back: another cat entirely while you're gone, ripping you off and pawning it all, or lighting up your joints, or walking on the ceiling, or phoning people long distance … God knows. A nightmare, a weird other world beyond the mirror, a terror city reverse thing, with unrecognizable entities creeping about; Donna crawling on all fours, eating from the animals' dishes … any kind of psychedelic wild trip, unfathomable and horrid.

Hell, he thought; for that matter, maybe Bob Arctor rises up in the night from deep sleep and does trips like that. Has sexual relations with the wall. Or mysterious freaks show up who he's never seen before, a whole bunch of them, with special heads that swivel all the way around, like owls'. And the audio-scanners will pick up the far-out demented conspiracies hatched out by him and them to blow up the men's room at the Standard station by filling the toilet with plastic explosives for God knows what brain-charred purpose. Maybe this sort of stuff goes on every night while he just imagines he's asleep—and is gone by day.

Bob Arctor, he speculated, may learn more new information about himself than he is ready for, more than he will about Donna in her little leather jacket, and Luckman in his fancy duds, and even Barris—maybe when nobody's around Jim Barris merely goes to sleep. And sleeps until they reappear.

But he doubted it. More likely Barris whipped out a hidden transmitter from the mess and chaos of his room—which, like all the other rooms in the house, had now for the first time come under twenty-four-hour scanning—and sent a cryptic signal to the other bunch of cryptic motherfuckers with whom he currently conspired for whatever people like him or them conspired for. Another branch, Bob Arctor reflected, of the authorities.