of an old classic sounded: such signals would mark the real start of the evening, when these dressy stragglers on strews of sawdust would shift from out-of-place to right-at-home.
Brest tugged Bix along and Trilby followed after. Here, thought Jonquil, is a marriage in trouble.
Out of the madhouse at last and on the road, thought Condor Plasch. His buddy Blayne had one fucked-up family. “You have one fucked-up family, Blayne-O,” he said.
“The shit they don’t eat, they are.” Stoic, dark, an anodyne for Condor’s worldly woes, Blayne glanced out the passenger side and dug idly into a coat pocket.
“One last hurdle, we head west.”
No comment from Blayne.
Condor wove from street to street out of the housing development. His tongue barbell knocked against the inside edge of his zipper mouth. He pictured lightning jags over wet enamel. “Yep, that’s where we be headed. Put in our time tonight, pack up, ride way the fuck over to San Fran, where the funny papers are sayin’ all good zipheads congregate.” Blayne nodded but said nothing. “What’s up, my good bud?”
Blayne stared over: “Me and Altoona did the lip thing today.” He fetched out a kerchief, blue and white checked, rubberbanded at the middle and pulled into rabbit ears at the top.
“She just another sneerfuck privately pining to kiss metal?”
Blayne reared back. “Get real. This is Altoona you’re talking about.”
“So did she spill? Whether her and Pim did it, I mean.”
“She implied.” Blayne unbanded the kerchief. “Real strong.”
“They’ve been walking funny since Easter.”
Once, thought Condor, those two chicks had been a stone-cold drag. Couple o’ wannabes.
Lately, they’d started getting interesting.
First, Pim had sidled up to him outside the cafeteria and brazenly requested their piercer’s phone number. That had been followed by obsessive stares and all, capped by rumors of what she and Altoona had done over Easter.
“Not too raunchy in the visual way neither, them two,” said Condor. “Cute lobes, big swellers beneath their sweaters, killer curves that narrow down into a tight clench below.”
Blayne dropped a compliment: “They’d be hot and finger-rocking good in the sack.”
“But wait up,” said Condor. “We had to go through whole heaping gobs of pain when we had our way them girls’d let that shit be perpetrated on them you-know-where. I can still smell that cream-white oval pan with the red drool and spit, me goggle-eyed over it with my wuttering head on wobbly like I was fit to pass out. And I can feel the crimp of that skin-punch as my blood sprayed out over Cabrille’s fist.”
Condor signaled a turn.
“And those were my lips! You think I’d let anyone do that to my gens?”
Blayne shrugged. “Believe what you want. I think they did it. Anyway, we get to find out tonight.”
Yeah, right. “What’s with the pills?”
“Some heady stuff,” Blayne replied. “Brain revealers, Altoona calls ’em. While they were in Topeka, before they drove to Cabrille’s parlor, they met this guy in a bar whose brother used the university labs in Lawrence to make it pure. No shit, no cut, no speed. Just a smooth high hit.”
Condor’s stomach flexed. “I dunno. Last time, my gut took a turn, loops of no-no-no and a quick uncatchable ralph or two, floors to mop in a dead-dog stupor the next morning, and pain, pain, pain. So I’m gonna beg off.”
“That was Cobra’s street-scam crap, cut six ways from Sunday with baby powder and strychnine, more’n likely. This stuff’s the genuine article. Altoona says she and Pim took hits, got naked, it went on forever. She told me, get this, she told me her pussy tingled like a fizzing sizzling hot tub and that her sexlobe felt like it had swelled up and stretched out near three feet long and that soft wet hot invisible slave-tongues were lapping and sucking every goddamn cubic inch of it, hour after hour of yummy sexy shit, and I ain’t lyin’.”
“Altoona said that?”
“In so many words.”
What the fuck.
He and Blayne had gotten into black candles a year before. They had written bleak poetry to the loneliness, sharing the verses before they engaged in yet one more bout of fruitless suck and flay.
They had stood by one another in Kansas City twice while a well-paid felony-risker had taken a tattoo needle to their underaged skin.
And they had gone together through the pain of zipper installation, a Christmas break Condor would never forget, the unending stairstep of hurt across his mouth and back again, the blood, the swelling, somehow managing to coax Blayne through the same.
The other kids’ taunts thereafter were as nothing. They were as the bip-bip-bip of the zipper handle against his right chinflesh as he walked, a tickle soon become custom.
Now his buddy and lover (the one kid in the world who likewise had his ear attuned to the suck-tunnel of emptiness, who grokked that the probability of truly sharing anything with anyone anywhere ever was zip zero zilch) held forth a pill to pixie-dust the next several hours away.
Prom shit would unfold its truth, the lows lower, the highs higher.
And possibly in there, he and Blayne would get to gawk at two stripped chicks, blend flesh, Pim’s unbagged sexlobe inside his mouth, her letting out little girlish gasps as his steel barbell brushed her forbidden lobe and his greedy fingers parted her zipper-teeth below and snugged their way into her moist hot clench.
“Well okay, give it here,” he said. “Will we make it to the lot before buzz-time?”
“Five minutes after gulpdown, it kicks in.”
“Works for me.”
The pale yellow pill lay bitter on Condor’s tongue. It took two hard swallows. Even then, the damned thing stuck in his throatpipe. But its bitter taste finally melted away, and Condor asked Blayne where they were supposed to do the girls.
“In the costume shop, during the search for the stiffs. She and Pim’ll be pilling out too. Oughta be dropping it right about now.”
Four minutes later, when Condor steered into the parking lot entrance, he felt a giggle bubble up out of his gut. “Oh jeez.” It was a wavelet, yep, and he could see huge waves, shiny blue, way far out but edging closer.
“Yeah, I know,” said Blayne. “But keep it tamped down till we get past Tweed’s tight little kid sister and flash our passes at ol’ Dunsmore. Once we’re past the front table and into the gym, we can giggle as much as we freakin’ feel like it, ’midst the dimness and death-terror and the whole dad-blamed fucked-up mess of a world.”
“Blayne?” Condor said.
“Yeah?” The dark blue niobium in Blayne’s puffy lips gleamed like a blueberry blintz.
“Tonight,” he laughed, then bottled it up and jammed in a stopper. “I have a super-strong feeling that we’re going to have the best goddamn time of our whole entire friggin’ motherfuckin’ lives!”
“Could be, buddy. Could be.”
“Blayne?”
“Yeah?”
“I love you, Blayne.”
The smile vanished. “Yeah. Love.”
Blayne looked out the windshield. “Come on, my man, she’s waving you on. Don’t blow it.”
Zane Fronemeyer’d been a warmup. Offing him and his wives had simply swept obtrusive clutter into the dustbin, which made for clearer lines of action ahead.
But they were peripheral victims.
Sheriff Blackburn, revived to offer up his voice for capture on tape, had given a foretaste of the main event. He, after all, had made the ultimate sacrifice in the school building, and roping him into place had led to a perfect and tasty omniscience.
