dripped out of the tank and back onto the pile. Eyes bulging, he looked down at the smashed heap of marching powder. “My God! I see Jesus! I see His Face in these Satanic drugs! I am Saved! Glory Be!”
He looked at my face and laughed. “Relax, sport. I’m just practicing. I’m going to be president one day. It’s important to get these things right.”
“The book—”
“Fuck the book. I’ve just had a religious conversion. Were you impressed?”
“I kind of expected you to be a religious man, in any case,” I said, looking for something heavy.
“Ringo says religion is a political tool,” he honked, squeezing his eyes shut and trying to claw through to his sinuses.
“Who’s Ringo?”
Junior wrenched open the left-hand drawer in the desk and ripped from it a scrawny-looking cuddly toy with its eyes plucked out and awful stains on its mouth.
My back bumped into the door. “And…he says things, does he?”
“Yeahhhhhh,” Junior sighed, stroking Ringo’s stomach in a disturbingly sexual way.
“Okay. He speaks to you. That’s fine. However, I’d appreciate it if you could save the conversation in your head for later and address the matter at hand.”
“Ringo could speak to you, too.”
“Yeah,” I said. I gave a halfhearted wave in the direction of the stained object in Junior’s fist. “Hi, Ringo.”
“No,” Junior intoned, unsmiling. “You have to press his stomach.”
“Why?”
“You have to. You can’t leave until you’ve pressed his stomach.”
On reflection, I decided that this would be easier than, say, having warm salty water shot into my dadpaste factory. I could handle this. Junior was obviously a coke fiend and a congenital shitbrain. Why not humor him? It seemed to me to be the simplest path.
“I’d be happy to. But on the understanding that we start dealing like men after this, yes?”
Junior held the skinny mutilated horror out at arm’s length toward me. “Press his fucking stomach!”
I moved forward and pushed two fingers into the thing’s gut. A voicebox ground into life with a hideous low rasp. Like an eighty-year-old chainsmoking hooker who hadn’t yet slipped in her teeth.
“Women are best when they can’t talk any more,” it said.
I flinched back, but Junior grabbed my wrist. Tendons stood out in his arm, and his knuckles whitened. He was using all his strength. And it wasn’t all that.
“Morrrrre,” he growled.
I pressed the stomach again.
“Where’s my dinner, bitch?”
And:
“God says queers are special firewood.”
“That’s enough,” I said.
“I said fucking
I twisted my arm around and he squealed as his wrist bent, but he refused to let go. I put the base of my left hand into his nose and turned it into a bathmat.
He reeled backward, clutching the toy, his fingers twisted into it. It kept rasping: “Americans are born, not made.” “Stupid people just like stuff simple.” “If they can’t see you drinking, you’re not an alcoholic.”
Junior dragged himself into the seat behind the desk. “You’re doomed now, you stupid fuck. I’m gonna be the president one day. Daddy says. He says presidents are people like us.”
Ringo said: “Fuck America and get rich like astronauts.”
“Oh, God,” Junior groaned. “Where’s my Womb Thing?”
He scrabbled in the desk for a moment and produced a glass screw-top jar filled with a thick, clotted yellow fluid. Junior unzipped a badly discolored little penis and began to jerk off into the jar with the maniacal fury of an ugly ape in humping season.
I snatched up one of the big Tiffany lamps, flipped it around in my hand, and brought the edge of its heavy base down in his lap.
He screamed and jerked forward, inadvertently head-butting his desk.
I gave him a few minutes. In the course of my work, I’ve had occasion to hit people before. I can tell when I’ve hit them too hard, because they always puke. I can tell when they wake up, and I can tell when they’re faking it. Junior woke up after a couple of minutes, but was playing dead.
I stepped over to his bar, unstopped a bottle of vodka, and poured it over his head. He was good, I’ll give him that. Barely fluttered an eyelash.
