Benchley, Peter - Novel 07 Read online

  "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.

  Through the tinted glass of the BMW's windshield, he saw what looked to be a woman beating a giant animal.

  The passenger's-side door opened, and out tumbled a flurry of gray fur with a fluffy white tail—and a human head.

  Preston's mind tried to deny the reality, strove to discern it as a hallucination. Delirium tremens.

  But reality would not be denied. It was a man dressed up to resemble a rabbit.

  The man rolled on the ground and struggled to his knees. Immediately the driver's-side door opened and disgorged a frenzied woman—a little sprig of a thing but mad as a hornet and with fists flying like a cyclone.

  “Son of a bitch!” she shouted. "Worthless bastard . . . stupid shit!"

  “But baby . . ."the man moaned.

  “Don't 'baby' me, scuzzball!" She kicked the man in the stomach. He rolled into a ball, furry fingerless mittens covering his head. She was wearing low, pointed-toe boots, like jodhpurs, and now she stepped back and aimed for an opening through which she could kick him in the head.

  From the moment Preston had been old enough to accept the existence of hostility (somewhere around three or four years old), he had made it a rule never to get involved in other people's unpleasantness. He wished he didn't have to be involved in the unpleasantnesses of his own life. Scenes were tacky, confrontations to be avoided. If you had something nasty to say, put it in a letter.

  But here he saw the very real prospect of a man being murdered by a lunatic. He declined to be responsible for another Kitty Genovese. He had no choice.

  He stepped forward and grabbed the little woman by the arm, unbalancing her, and he said, “Let's take it easy.”

  He was almost a foot taller than she, so she had to look up at him, and yet when she spoke, he had the sense that she was speaking down to him.

  “Who're you?" she snarled.

  He smiled, to show her that he meant no harm, and said, "You don't want to cripple him."

  "I don't?" She looked at Preston as if he were a gravy stain on her blouse. Then, without another word, she spun away and—fast as a mongoose—turned back and kicked him in the balls.

  He made a noise like a punctured tire and sat down, hard, beside the rabbit man. Nausea welled up into his throat, his eyes lost their focus, and waves of agony pulsed through his groin. Shamelessly, he covered and comforted his aggrieved balls.

  The woman strode back to the BMW and climbed aboard.

  “Hey, Bugs!” she called through the open window.

  The rabbit man looked up warily as the head to his costume—erectile ears, plastic nose, mischievous eyes with viewing slits cut through the pupils—flew out the window and landed in his lap.

  “Count on it," the woman shouted over the sound of her revving engine, **that's the last head you'll ever get from me." She snapped the car into gear and peeled away.

  I am marooned with a man who thinks he is a rabbit. Preston looked at the man and then at the sky and the mountains and the pristine adobe buildings and the curb on which they squatted like aimless derelicts. I would kill for a drink.

  The rabbit man raised one of his paws and, in poor imitation of Mel Blanc, chattered, “Aaaaah . . . what's up, Doc?"

  “Sweet Jesus," Preston murmured, holding his head.

  “She's a pisser, isn't she?"

  “That midget?"

  “Good thing you didn't call her a midget. She'd've really kicked ass. She can't stand size-ists."

  "You're married to that?"

  The rabbit man nodded and grinned and leaned back on his fuzzy elbows. He was taller than Preston, skinny as a pickerel, with the sharp beak of an osprey. His eyes were deep-set and shadowed by a shelf of bone and bushy brows. Wherever he lived, whatever he did for a living, he seldom saw the sun, for his skin was pasty white, splotched here and there with islands of gray.

  "Look at it from her point of view. I'm at this office party, celebrating our best year ever, sales up like four hundred percent over last year thanks to AIDS and whatnot—I make condoms, the whole line, ribbed, pimpled, speckled, French ticklers, reservoir tips, you name it—and we're all s'posed to dress on a business theme. So I get up like a rabbit—you know, people are doing it like rabbits, which is why we're doing so well, like that. Well, she won't go to the party 'cause she says, and who can blame her, 'What the hell am I s'posed to dress up like, a blow job?' So I'm driving home and I'm having a little trouble with the old yellow line—I guess I probably had about a hundred tequila sunrises—so I do the old, you know, one-eye gambit"— he covered one eye with one hand and mimicked driving with the other hand—"and it helps, but I guess not enough, 'cause this smokey pulls me over, and he does a double take when he sees this rabbit driving a BMW. Well, I tell you, these things"—he raised one of his rabbit feet—"they sure suck when it comes to walking a straight line, so we go downtown and I fail the breath test—fail it! I think I killed it!—and they see on the computer that I've got a couple of other DWIs pending, so they haul me right up there before the night-court judge, and he asks me why am I dressed like a rabbit. So I tell him the whole story—I mean, why not? The tequila's got me nice and mellow—only he's not so amused, and he pitches me in the drunk tank along with all these other dingbats and fags and weirdos, when all I am is dressed like Bugs Bunny, not exactly a felony. Like they say, it was a night to remember. Come the dawn, they give me two choices: ninety to one-twenty in the slam or a rehab center—which is like no choices, right?—and then they call Clarisse. She has to take time off from her job to come fetch me—she does Swedish massage over to the Emerald City spa for the rich and lamebrained, the woman's got hands like bear traps— which already sets her teeth on edge, but when she arrives Tm gone because they gave me my wallet back, so she has to search the whole strip till she finds me in a gin mill where I'm downing a few eye-openers."

  He shrugged and smiled. “See? She's got a right to be a little . . . miffed."

  Preston was enraptured by the tale, awed by the man's insouciance. How could he be so cavalier? If Preston had ever done anything remotely comparable to what this rabbit had just recounted, he would have . . . would have what? Seen a shrink? Joine
d a monastery? He didn't know, but he certainly would have known that he couldn't handle alcohol. He would have quit drinking. For sure.

  I am on an alien planet, I do not belong here. Where is Chuck? If I wait long enough, he will return and take me . . . where? Anywhere.

  “Ever been in a joint before?" asked the rabbit.

  ''Me?"

  "Me neither." He studied the adobe building. “Gotta beat jail, though. Gotta be a cruise. Do what they tell you, say what they tell you. And when you get out, just be careful where you go boozing."

  “You mean you don't want to stop?"

  "Drinking? What for? Drinking's not a problem for me. I'm just unlucky. I get caught a lot." He cocked an eyebrow at Preston. "You do have a problem?"

  "People seem to think so."

  "Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke. What do they know?" He rolled up onto his paws, stood and regarded himself critically. “She could’ve left me a pair of pants."

  Preston rose and grabbed his suitcase and straightened his tie. He joined the rabbit before the big black-glass door.

  “By the way, Fm Scott Preston."

  “Duke. Duke Bailey."

  Preston shook his paw.

  “What was it Hamlet said?" Duke asked. “ ‘Once more onto the beach, we happy few, we band of brothers.’ Something like that."

  “You scared?"

  Preston swallowed and nodded. "Shitless."

  “No sweat. They don't torture you. They can't find out anything you don't want 'em to."

  “I guess."

  It's what find out that worries me.

  IV

  He sat on a couch in the main lobby of the clinic, feeling ill. He had been violated.

  First, they had taken him into a gray room furnished with nothing but a gray metal table, and there the executive director of the clinic—a cheesy polyester gladhander who wore a button that said, "Hi! My name is GUY! Have a GREAT day!"—tore up Preston's suitcase. Literally. He prized up the lining and removed mouthwash, after-shave lotion, two rolls of mints ("Sorry, Scott, but some people press cocaine into mint molds") and, worst of all, the collected stories of John Cheever, the collected stories of Irwin Shaw and Boswell's Life of Johnson. For consolation Preston was given—given? They were bestowed upon him as if they were the Dead Sea Scrolls—the only two books he would be permitted to read in the next four weeks: a dippy little prayer book called Twenty-four Hours a Day and the A.A. bible, which, Hi!-My-name-is-GUY! told him, "everybody calls The Big Book." ("The Big Book!" What was this, Dick and Jane go to A.A.? "Look, Dick, look at Spot! Spot is falling on his ass! I bet Spot has a problem?”)

  "Focus, Scott," Guy explained when Preston protested the confiscation of his books. "Books are an escape. They take you away, let you forget. We don't want you to forget, Scott. We want you to focus, focus, focus ... on your disease."

  And at the word "disease"—like some Pavlovian cue—Guy (whose last name, according to the plaque on his desk, was Larkin, though evidently nobody ever used last names around here) embarked on the whole alcoholism litany again. When Preston declined to fall to his knees and kiss Guy's hem and confess to being a hopeless lush, Guy said, "Oh no, I wasn't an alcoholic either, Scott," and proceeded to recite his whole tale of woe, some blather about nobody knowing he had a problem because the only drinking he ever did was at night in his garage, where he'd filled the windshield-washer container in his car with vodka. One night he didn't show up for bed, and his wife found him passed out on the air filter.

  Why was it that all these people felt they had to spill their guts to you right away? Preston didn't feel like spilling his guts to anybody, ever.

  When Guy didn't find any contraband in Preston's suitcase or in his clothes, he said, "I'm real proud of you, Scott. That's a very positive sign," and he directed Preston to the infirmary. The fun had just begun.

  The infirmary was another office off the lobby, run by a manatee of a woman named Nurse Bridget, who took Preston's height and weight and blood pressure

  and samples of his several fluids and (of course) had to tell him about her husband, who was a fireman until the time he climbed a ladder and rescued a woman from the fourth floor of a burning building but then, because he was smashed out of his mind, dropped her off the ladder from three and a half stories up, and about how she and Sean spent his enforced retirement watching game shows and drinking Reunite until he died of cirrhosis and she was committed to an institution by her daughter, Bridey.

  All the while Nurse Bridget was inflicting her life story and her sphygmomanometer on Preston, he heard grunts and protests through a closed door behind her, and at about the time she was launching into the details of her progress through the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, the door sprang open and out staggered Duke, looking like a man who had just been a plaything for the KGB.

  He saw Preston and said curtly, “You gay?"

  "Me? Hardly."

  "Too bad. This place is paradise for fruits." He looked back into the room from which he had emerged, and he shouted furiously, "Have a nice day!" and then, clutching a terry-cloth robe around his middle, he lurched out of the infirmary.

  A second later, a short, porcine male nurse appeared in the doorway of the back room. He was forcing his chubby fingers into a pair of rubber gloves. He reached to the side, then brought his hand back into view and beckoned to Preston—with a rubber-covered index finger slathered with a clot of Vaseline.

  Nurse Bridget was fiddling with the blood-pressure bulb, and the needle must have jumped off the dial because she took a step back and exclaimed, “My stars!”

  As Nature is kind to human beings and erases all specific memory of pain, so Preston was spared any physical recollection of the discomfort of having his fundament probed, not for malignant polyps but for suppositories filled with controlled substances. He could not, however, expunge the memory of the indignity of lying face-down on a steel table while the creature took a leisurely journey up what he called Chocolate Avenue and regaled Preston the while with the saga of his descent into the black hole of Valium addiction.

  Now he sat in the lobby, beside Duke in a robe and slippers. They did not speak, did not look at each other. It was as if they were both ashamed.

  There was nothing medical about the atmosphere in the clinic, no signs pointing to emergency or admonishing SILENCE, no crepe-soled attendants rushing about on missions of mercy, no uniforms of any kind. The passersby, and there were many, could have been secretaries or bureaucrats or doctors or patients, for they all wore casual street clothes.

  The decor was simple and understated. A visitor might have discerned only two hints about the purpose of the place. There were ashtrays every whereon stands, screwed into walls and on practically every flat surface. Smoking was not merely tolerated, it was encouraged as an acceptable replacement crutch while the afflicted learned to maneuver without the braces of booze. And there were two semiabstract posters, which, after long study, appeared to contain the messages "One Day at a Time" and "Easy Does It."

  Duke crossed his legs, uncrossed them, crossed them the other way, uncrossed them. Preston couldn't tell whether he sought comfort or modesty, and he didn't much care, for he had locked his mind on to a vision of a hand opening a freezer door and withdrawing a bottle of Stolichnaya and pouring the gelid syrup into a tulip wineglass and swirling it around and raising it to his lips and—

  A commotion approached across the lobby. There was no reason for Preston to assume that it would home in on him and Duke, but he did. And it did.

  It was a Hispanic behemoth, wearing sandals hewn from truck tires, jeans so often washed in such virulent detergents that they were flayed and gray, a black T-shirt whose mesh fabric strained against a cylinder of suet and each of whose sleeves was rolled up around a package of cigarettes, and enough tattoos to recount the entire history of the discovery of the New World. All Preston could see of its head was a drooping Zapata mustache, for the rest was enveloped in a haze of cigarette s
moke.

  It greeted everyone it passed: "Hey, man!" "What's goin' down?" "How they hangin'?"

  It stopped before the couch and proffered its hand to Duke. On the extended arm Preston made out the legends "Born To Hang," "Fuck Death—I'll Take Dishonor" and "The Only Living Abortion."

  "Hey, man," it said, a cigarette crushed between its front teeth. "Hector . . . junkie . . . lulu."

  To Preston's amazement, Duke brightened. He held out his hand and allowed himself to be yanked to his feet. “Duke,” he said. "DWI . . . lulu.''

  Hector pumped Duke's hand, discarded it and took Preston's. His teak-colored eyes waited for Preston to speak, but Preston didn't know what to say. It was a foreign language.

  Duke rescued him. “His name's Hector. He's a junkie. And he's like me, a lulu: He's here in lieu of going to jail."

  “I see."

  “You?" Hector said to Preston.

  “Scott," Preston began. Then he stopped. He refused to say the word “alcoholic." Or “rummy." Or “lush." He was not these things. But what could he say? Social drinker? Hardly. Then a word occurred to him, a word from his last connection to the real world.

  “Juicer," he said.

  Hector nodded. “Kinda name's Scott? First or last?"

  “First. Scott Preston."

  “Poor WASP bastard. Parents who give their kids two last names oughta have their balls cut off." Hector squashed his cigarette in an ashtray, unrolled a sleeve and let a pack drop into his hand.

  He offered a cigarette to Duke, who snatched it and said, “I’m s'posed to quit."

  Hector lit it for him with a denim-burnished Zippo. “We're all s'posed to quit everything alla time. Piss on 'em. something's gonna kill us. Might's well be something fun."

  He offered one to Preston, who declined, then lit one for himself, sucking so hard on the weed as the flame touched it that by the time he closed the lighter, a third of the cigarette was ash.

  Duke was smiling at the cigarette in his hand. Color suffused his face, wiping away the wan and pasty look. “All right.” he said.