Skin Deep

'Toby,' the girl said, bending over him. 'Sweetie, you okay?'

He brought one hand up to his throat. 'Do I look okay, you fucking idiot?' he said. I stepped on his throat again, hand and all, just to refresh his etiquette. He gagged, and the girl grabbed ineffectually at my ankle. As her fingers scraped at my skin I could hear the plaid shirt talking on the phone. I raised my shoe and inspected it. Mr. Beautiful hadn't bled on my laces.

He coughed. 'Is he calling the cops?' he rasped, staring wildly at Mr. Zealous.

'I certainly hope so,' I said.

'Jesus. Get me out of here. Now, get me out of here right now.' He was talking to the circle, and he looked panicked. A buzz arose from the circle as its members began to discuss what they'd just seen as though it had happened on the other side of a television screen. 'I can't have the cops,' he said desperately. No one looked at him.

'Why?' I said. 'The cops are a good deal compared to me. If it weren't for the sweetheart of the rodeo here, you'd be the Fourth of July dinner special. Asshole on the half shell.'

'You don't understand,' he said. 'You,' he added vehemently. I was the only one making eye contact; all the others were melting away toward their tables, figuring out what they'd say tomorrow when they told the story. The music kicked in again, still Led Zeppelin, and he raised his voice. 'You've got to get me out of here. If you don't, I'm finished.' I looked over my shoulder, but there was no doubt about it. He was talking to me.

'Why in the world,' I said, 'would I help you?'

'Five hundred dollars,' he said. 'I'll pay you five hundred dollars to get me home.'

Five hundred dollars sounded pretty good. It even made one or two of the chickens glance back. The plaid shirt had hung up the phone. In some corner of my subconscious my bankbook gave out a starved squeal. 'Cash?' I said.

'Cash.'

'Seven fifty,' I said.

'Fine, fine, whatever. Just get me home.'

'Why can't you get out of here yourself?'

'We got rid of the limo,' he said, rubbing at his throat. 'The asshole driver wanted to watch the fireworks.'

'What about her?' I gestured toward the Korean girl.

His eyes rolled. 'Who cares?'

I lifted my foot again. The muscles in my leg twitched rebelliously. 'What about her?'

'Send her home in a cab,' he said sullenly.

'Toby,' the girl said in an anguished squeal. 'You got to be kidding.'

'Just get her away from me,' said the hero on the floor.

'That's the nicest thing you could do for her,' I said, 'but it costs.'

'In my pocket.'

'You can't,' the Korean girl said. 'I'm not old enough to drink, Toby. Cripes, you know about the ABC and the Spice Rack. I'll lose my job.'

'Tough shit,' he said.

Something dropped into place behind the beautiful face, a cold front that turned her dark eyes into holes I wouldn't have wanted to fall into. 'Listen,' she said in a tone of voice that could have sliced ripe tomatoes, 'you can't shovel it at anyone forever. Sooner or later, you have to be nice.'

'Hey,' he said, glaring at her, 'do you know how to spell 'fuck you'?'

I shoved my hand into the right front pocket of the hero's leather pants and came up with a wad of bills, mostly of the impressive denominations you see in ads for the California lottery. 'Where do you live?' I asked her.

'Hollywood.' She looked at Mr. Beautiful as though he were something that someone gravely ill had spit onto the floor. 'You're going to be sorry, Toby,' she said.

I gave her a fifty. 'He's pretty sorry already,' I said. 'This is for the cab.' I handed her a hundred. 'And this is for your dry cleaning.'

She looked from me down to him, the dregs of his drink dripping from her flowing hair. She still looked good. 'Yeah? Who's going to clean me? Sooner or later he's going to come back and make smooches, and I'm going to brain him with a flower pot, and when I do he'll kill me. You don't know him.'

'Honey, if he gives you any kind of trouble, even constructive criticism, I'll scramble him into an omelet and have him for breakfast.' I leaned down to pick him up.

'Simeon,' Roxanne said from behind the bar, 'you're not going to help him?'

'It's better for everybody,' I said, pulling Loverboy to his feet. 'Otherwise, she's going to have to go to the police station, too.'

'No way in the world,' the Korean girl said. 'Not as long as I can still run.'

'But he's such scum,' Roxanne said plaintively. 'And he's got it coming.'

I heard a siren in the distance. Loverboy tugged at me, looking trapped and terrified. I shrugged it off.

'When the cops get here, tell them he's already left. Tell them his horse showed up. I promise you, if he screws around with her again, I'll make sure he eats the whole deck, okay?' I turned to the Korean girl and fished a crumpled card from my pocket. 'There's a phone number here. Use it if he gives you a problem. You can call it anytime, day or night.' I looked up at Roxanne. 'You going to help out or not?'

She shrugged. 'I guess. I'll get her a cab.'

'Get her two if she wants them, they're on Prince Valiant here. Are you going to be here when I get back?' The siren was louder now.

Roxanne gave me a dubious look and then a small shrug. 'What the hell,' she said.

'See you then,' I said. I put my arm around the hero's shoulders. 'Come on, beautiful,' I told him, 'this is your exit.'

For the first twenty minutes or so after he told me to turn right-north, up toward the Malibu Colony-we shared your basic sullen silence. His fringe flapped in the breeze through the open window, and he sucked at his mangled tongue and fingered his jaw once in a while, but other than that he kept his conversational skills to himself.

That was fine with me.

Traffic on the Pacific Coast Highway was light in both directions. The fireworks were about to start, and most people were staying put. Sweet Alice, the low-rider's special I'd won at cards from a glue-sodden card player named Jaime on a night of which I had only fragmentary memories because of Jaime's generosity with his glue, was chugging along in an exemplary fashion. She was in temporary remission from the tubercular cough that had plagued her recently. Maybe it was the carburetor, whatever that was.

At any rate, that was the limit of my mechanical sophistication, a state I'd long considered remedying. My long-ago graduate adviser when I was taking my doctorate in English, a waspish and perfectly dressed Ph.D. named Miles Brand, maintained that there were people who were put on earth solely to tend to the health of carburetors, and that any attempt by the rest of us to penetrate those mysteries was nothing more or less than irresponsible monkeying with God's master plan. Miles's comfortable faith in the secure future of the upper classes was much greater than mine, probably a result of his lifelong love for Victorian novelists. Trollope, Dickens, Gissing, and Thackeray in the nineteenth century-and, for that matter, Miles in the twentieth-didn't seem to worry as much about gravity as I did. What happens to the top of the social pyramid when you pull out the bottom three or four layers? In all, it seemed to me that the people who understood carburetors could get along much better without the people who understood Dickens and Thackeray than the people who understood Dickens and Thackeray could get along without the people who understood carburetors.

About twelve miles up the road, Mr. Beautiful stirred. He dabbed once or twice at his lip and then reached into his leather pocket and pulled out a small wad of tissue. 'Don't hit any bumps,' he said sulkily.

I aimed for something that could have been a large tortoise or a small land mine and hit it. Alice bounced. 'Anything else?' I said. Roxanne had given us some paper towels as we left, and he'd wadded a couple around his cut palm. They got in his way as he tried to unwrap the tissues. He swore sharply and pulled the paper towels loose from his hand, tossed them to the floor, and peeled open the tissue. In it were six white pills, four small ones and