experienced tripper, and the dealer had probably been lying about the strength of the tablets. We smoked another joint and listened to some music, and then one by one people drifted off to their rooms. Sam lay stretched out on the sofa, his foot tapping in time to the music. I was the last to leave. I asked Sam if he was OK. He didn’t reply.
“You want someone to stay up with you?” I asked.
His eyes opened, big and blank, but there was still no reply. I didn’t insist. I had an early class I couldn’t afford to cut, and I knew from experience that even good trips are bad trips when someone else is having them.
By the time I got up the next morning, Sam had crashed. He didn’t surface again until late that night. I was sitting in an attempted lotus position on a beanbag, making notes for a paper I had to write. The others were out somewhere.
“Hey, man!” I said. “How did it go?”
He looked at me in a strange, expressionless way.
“Phil,” he said flatly, as though recognizing someone from the distant past.
“What happened?”
He frowned.
“Nothing.”
“Last night, I mean. You dropped all that shit.”
A ghostly smile appeared and disappeared on his lips.
“Oh, that. The usual stuff, man.”
I shrugged and got back to my paper. Everyone’s trips were their own responsibility, but also their own business. If they wanted to share them with you, fine-unless of course they carried on about them at excessive length, as though they were somehow better and more interesting than yours. But if they chose not to talk about them, you had to respect that too. A fundamental tenet of our shared philosophy was that language was a highly suspect medium of communication, clumsy and imprecise, a tool used by the straight world to impose its rigid, normalizing concepts on the infinite, threatening freedom of the human spirit. We weren’t any more consistent about this than about anything else. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one frequently went on and on about at ball-breaking length. But Sam had chosen to exercise his right to remain silent, and anyone who questioned him further would stand revealed as an undercover agent for the thought police.
Within a few days, the whole episode had turned into the stuff of myth, one of the heroic exploits to be celebrated whenever members of the tribe gathered late at night and the communal joint passed from hand to hand. Its connection with real events became increasingly tenuous. Before long we were telling people how we would have been busted by a crack narcotics squad that night if it hadn’t been for the quick thinking of Greg, or maybe Larry, who’d dropped the whole stash of twelve-count ’em! —
Sam never contested this version of events, or talked about what had really happened. In fact he rarely said anything much any more. He had changed, becoming quieter, more serious and withdrawn, less accessible to our noise and nonsense. The reason seemed obvious. A month or so earlier, Sam had received his “Greetings from the President” letter from the draft board. He had been shocked at the time, because he had drawn a pretty high number in the lottery and had thought he was safe.
Now that the date when he had to report for induction was looming closer, however, he seemed strangely resigned to his fate. Again, we thought we knew why. With his level of education, Sam would almost certainly be able to land a clerical job and put in his year’s tour of duty filing reports and typing letters. Nevertheless, the situation inevitably created tension in our midst. Larry’s turn was also coming up soon, and he had a number in the low teens, making it almost inevitable that he would be drafted. From time to time he talked of taking a bus up to Canada, or maybe applying to join the National Guard, but he never did anything about it, and we all knew he never would.
The rest of us were safe. Vince had already been turned down because of his bad eyes and generally poor health, while Greg and I were protected for the moment by the student deferment. We never openly discussed the matter, but this manifest inequality slowly drove a wedge into the heart of our intimacy, splintering it apart. One night just before he left, Sam freaked out for the first time in our company, raving on about the world being divided into two kinds of people, the ones with real souls and feelings, and a bunch of phonies who were just pretending to be alive.
Nothing came of it, however, and a couple of days later Sam packed up his belongings and set off to start his two months’ basic training at Fort Lewis, in Washington State. Our farewells were awkward and subdued. A month later a woman I’d been seeing on and off for the past year invited me to move in with her. I was glad to leave. Larry had also been drafted by then, and Vince and Greg were spending more and more time with people I didn’t know. That stage of my life was over. It was time to move on.
I never expected to see any of them again.
3
Pearce and Robinson were sitting in the parking lot at Taco Time when they got the call.
“I wouldn’t’ve went if I’da known,” Pearce said through a mouthful of chicken tostada.
Kimo Robinson sipped his banana shake tentatively. He’d felt like grazing on something, but his stomach couldn’t hack spicy food any more. He felt queasy just watching Pearce feed, lettuce shreds hanging off his bristles, hot sauce dribbling down his chin.
“But you’re there, what you going to do?” the rookie demanded, spraying a gobbet of refried beans at the windshield. “Can’t walk out on the wife’s best friend’s dinner. Mandatory detail.”
“It’s my way or the highway.”
“Pardon me?”
Pearce was regarding him quizzically. Robinson shrugged.
“I saw this program on TV. Some guy who’s written a book, you know? He says men are from Mars and women from Venus.”
“Jean’s from Omaha,” said Pearce, frowning.
Two weeks ago Robinson showed up for work, sarge tells him, “Congratulations, Kimo, you’re an FTO for the next three months.” No one liked field training assignments, stuck every shift with some guy fresh from the eleven-week course watching your every move, time to time saying, “Gee, that’s not what they taught us at the Academy.” Plus Robinson didn’t want to hear about Pearce’s marital problems. He wanted to tune into KING-FM and relax with Haydn, Handel, those old guys who knew how to kick back and have fun.
“Not only is Chari a bitch on wheels,” Pearce continued, “she’s cranked up on medication the whole time. Obsesses over every goddamn thing, never shuts her mouth … I spent the whole evening processing anger. You know?”
Robinson set his shake down on the dash. He could feel the burn starting up already. Maybe he should see a doctor. “Your core is good,” the guy down at the garage had told him. Guy was talking about the transmission, but somehow the words had stuck. “Your core is good.” Kept coming back to him like the slogan from some cheesy commercial you can’t shake. Maybe because he knew it wasn’t true for him any more than for the goddamn car. Fact was, their cores were both fucked.
We should never have moved here, he thought for the thousandth time. It had seemed like a great idea at the time. For the price of a studio apartment in Honolulu, they could get a family home with a yard and a garage in Seattle. True, he’d had to start at the bottom of the ladder again, going from sergeant in Hawaii back to plain officer with the King County Police, but that had seemed a price worth paying. Marti was delighted with her new home, the kids were happy at school, he had his RV to go hunting and fishing. Everything was just great, except that his core was fucked. I wasn’t meant to live in this cold, wet, timber-haunted landscape, he thought. I was meant to live and die on the islands, and my gods are punishing me for my desertion.
The call was the one cops dreaded most: domestic disturbance. Then Robinson heard the address, and eased
