HE HAD DROPPED ACID maybe a dozen times, but had never forgotten his name before. He remembered the others—Cassie, Lance, Van—even though he’d left them waiting in the parking lot—when? A couple, ten minutes ago? An hour? Up until then, the farthest out he’d ever been was in high school, when he stared through the white on a sixty-watt bulb and saw the filament vibrating to a solo on Cream’s “Sitting on Top of the World.” It called to him in guitarese and he shrieked back. The filament said all life vibrated with a common energy, that we would exist only as long as our hearts beat to that indestructible rhythm. Brang-brangeddy-brong, brang-brangeddy-brong! Or something like. Actually, he might have been on mescaline the time the light bulb had played him the secret of the universe, or maybe it was Clapton, who was wailing back then like the patron saint of hallucinogens. But tonight his mind was well and truly blown by the blotter acid his new friends had called blue magic.
He wasn’t particularly worried that he couldn’t remember his straight name. He didn’t feel at all attached to that chump at the moment, or to his dreary future. A name was nothing but a fence, closing him in. He was much happier now that the blue magic had transformed him into the wizard Space Cowboy, whose power was to leap all fences and zigzag through dayglo infinities at the speed of meth-amphetamine. Remembering the name on his student ID card was about as important as remembering the first law of thermodynamics. His secret identity was flunking physics and probably freshman comp too, which meant he wasn’t going to last much longer at Notre Dame. And since his number in the draft lottery was fourteen, he was northbound just as soon as they booted him out of college—no way Nixon was sending him to Cambodia! So long, Amerika, hello Toronto. Or maybe Vancouver. New episodes in The Adventures of Space Cowboy, although he wasn’t all that excited about picking snot icicles from his mustache. Lance said Canada would be a more happening country if it had beach front on the Gulf of Mexico.
He realized he had forgotten something else. Why had he come back to his room? Nineteen years old and his mind was already Swiss fucking cheese! He laughed at himself and then admired all the twisty little holes that were busy drilling themselves into the floor. The dull reality of the dorm emptied into them like soapy water swirling down a drain. The room reeked of Aqua Velva and Brylcreem, Balsinger’s familiar weekend stink. That’s it. Something to do with Balls, he thought. But his roommate was long since gone, no doubt sucking down quarts of Strohs while he told some Barbie doll his dream of becoming the world’s most polyester dentist. Balls was the enemy; their room was divided territory, the North and South Viet Nam of Walsh Hall. Even when they were out, their stuff remained on alert. His pointy-toed boots were aimed at Balls’s chukkas. Pete Townshend swung a guitar at Glen Campbell’s head and Zap Comix blew cartoon smoke through the steamy windows of Penthouse. Now he remembered, sort of. He was supposed to borrow something—except the paint was melting off the walls. He picked the black cowboy hat off a pile of his dirty clothes, uncrumpled it and plunked it on. Sometimes the hat helped him think.
There was a knock. “Space?” Cassie peeked in and saw him idling at the desk. “Space, we’re leaving.”
It was Lance who had abridged his freak name—Lance, the wizard of words. Space didn’t care; if someone he didn’t like called him Space, he just played a few bars of Steve Miller’s “Space Cowboy” in his head. Cassie he liked; she could call him whatever she wanted. In his opinion, Cassandra Demaras was the coolest chick who had ever gotten high. She stood almost six foxy feet tall and was wearing a man’s pin-striped vest from Goodwill over a green tee shirt. Her hair was black as sin. Space lusted to see it spread across his pillow, only he knew it would never happen. She was a senior and artsy and Lance’s. Not his future.
“Did you find it?” she asked.
“Ah … not yet,” said Space cautiously. At least someone knew why he was here.
She stepped into the room. “Lance is going to split without you, man.” Space had only joined the tribe last month and had already been left behind twice for stoned incompetence. “What’s the problem?”
Her question was an itch behind his ear, so he scratched. She stared at him as if his skull were made of glass, and he felt the familiar tingle of acid telepathy. She used her wizardly powers to read his mind—what there was of it—and sighed. “The key, Space. You’re supposed to be looking for what’s-his-face’s key.”
“Balls.” Suddenly he was buried in a memory landslide. They had been sitting around waiting for the first rush and Lance had been laying down this rap about how they should do something about Cambodia and how some yippies at Butler had liberated the ROTC building with balloons and duct tape, and then Space had started in about how Balsinger was at school on a work-study grant and had to put in twelve hours a week pushing a broom through O’Shaughnessy Hall, the liberal arts building, for which he had the key, and then everybody had gotten psyched so to impress them all Space had volunteered to lift the key, except in the stairwell he had been blown away by a rush so powerful that he’d forgotten who he was and what the hell he was supposed to be doing, despite which his body had continued on to the room anyway and had been waiting here patiently for his mind to show up.
Space giggled and said, “He keeps it in the top drawer.”
Cassie went to Balls’s desk, opened it and then froze as if she was peering over the edge of reality.
“What’s he got in there now?” he asked, “Squid?”
As he came up behind her, he caught a telepathic burst that was like chewing aluminum foil. She was freaking out and he knew exactly why. This was where Balls kept his school supplies: a stack of blank three-by-five file cards held together with a red rubber band, scotch tape, a box of paper clips, six number 2 pencils with pristine erasers, six Bic ball points, a slide rule, an unopened bottle of Liquid Paper, and behind, loose-leaf, graph, and onionskin paper in perfect stacks. But it wasn’t just Balls’s stuff that had disturbed her. It was the way he had arranged everything, fitted it together with jigsaw-puzzle precision. In a world burning with love and napalm, this pinhead had taken the time to align pencils and pens, neaten stacks of paper—Space wouldn’t have been surprised if he had reorganized the paper clips in their box. All this brutal order was proof that aliens from Planet Middle America had landed and were trying to pass for human! Space was used to Balsinger, but imagining the straightitude of his roommate’s mind had filled Cassie with psychedelic dread.
“Space, are you as wasted as I think I am?” Her eyes had gone flat as tattoos.
“I don’t know. What’s the date?”
She frowned. “May 2, 1970.”
“Who’s president of the United States?”
“That’s the problem.”
He held up a fist. “How many fingers?”
She shook her head and was recaptured by the drawer.
The key to O’Shaughnessy Hall was next to the slide rule. Space picked it up and juggled it from one hand to another. It flickered through the air like a goldfish. This time when she glanced up, he bumped the drawer shut with his thigh. “Hey, remember what the dormouse said.”
“No, I’m serious.” She shook her head and her hair danced. “It’s like time is breaking down. You know what I mean? One second doesn’t connect to the next.”
“Right on!” He caught the key and closed his fist around it.
“Listen! I’ve got to know where the peak is, or else I can’t maintain. What if I just keep going up and up and up?”
“You’ll have a hell of a view.”
Maybe it was the wrong time for jokes. Space could see panic wisping off her like smoke. When he breathed it in, he got even higher. “Okay,” he said “so the first wave is a mother. But I’m here and you’re with me, so we’ll just ride it together, okay?” He surfed an open hand toward her. “Then we groove.”
“You don’t understand.” She licked her lower lip with a strawberry tongue. “Lance has decided he wants to score again, so we can trip all weekend. He’s weirding me out, Space. My brains are already oozing from my fucking ears and he’s looking for the next hit.”
The blue magic was giving him a squirrely vibe; he thought he could feel a bad moon rising over this trip. Space had seen a bummer just once, back in high school, when a kid claimed he had a tiny Hitler stuck in his throat and thrashed around and drank twenty-seven glasses of water until he puked. Space had been paranoid that whatever monsters were chewing on the kid’s brain would have him for dessert. But this kid—Space remembered him now—Lester Something, Lester was a pinched nobody who couldn’t even tie his shoes when he was buzzed, not a wizard like Cassie or Lance or Space, with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men.
“Am I okay, Space?” She had never asked him for help before, put herself in his power. “What’s going to happen to us?”
“We’re going to have an adventure.” Although he was worried about her, he was also turned on. He wanted to kiss his way through her hair to the pale skin on her neck. Instead he tugged at the brim of his hat. He was Space Cowboy. His power was that nothing could stop him, nothing could touch him. And so what if things were spinning out of control? That was the fun in doing drugs, wasn’t it?
“Ready to cruise?” He beamed at her and was relieved to see his smile reflected palely on her face.
Somewhere in the future, a van honked.
#
“Say wonderful.” Lance was giving Cassie orders.
The spooky moonlight spilled across the corn fields. Space glanced up from the floor of the van occasionally to see if the psychic ambience had improved any, but the lunar seas still looked like mold on a slice of electric bread.
“Wonderful,” she said absently.
“No, mean it.”
“Won … der … ful.” Cassie’s voice was a chickadee fluttering against her chest. Space knew this because she was wedged between him and Lance and they had their arms around her, crossing behind her back and over her chest, protecting her from lysergic acid diethylamide demons. He could feel her blood booming; her shallow breathing fondled his ribs. The Econoline’s tires drummed over seams in the pavement as its headlights unzipped the highway at sixty-five miles an hour. He found himself listening to the world with his shoulders and toes.
“Full of wonder.” Lance was smooth as an apple as he talked her down; his wizard power was making words dance. “I know, that can be scary, because you don’t know where you’re going or what you’re going to find. Strangeness probably, but so what? Life is strange, people are strange. Don’t fight it, groove on it.” He squeezed her and Space took his cue to do the same. “Say you’re a little girl at the circus at night and a clown comes up in the dark, and it’s like holy shit, where’s Mommy? But throw some light on him and you’re laughing.” He reached to flick on the overhead light. “See?”
It was the right thing to say because she blinked in the light and smiled, sending them flashes of pink cotton candy and dancing elephants and an acrobat hanging from a trapeze by his teeth. Space could feel her come spinning down toward them like a leaf. “ Wonderful,” she said, focusing. “I’ll try.”
Space was suddenly aware that his elbow was flattening her left breast and he was clutching Lance’s shoulder. He shivered, let his arm slip down and wiped his sweaty palm on his jeans.
“Heavy, man,” said Van. “You want to turn the light off before I miss the turn?” Van was at the wheel of his 1962 Ford Econoline van. It had a 144-cubic-inch, six-cylinder engine and a three-speed manual shift on the steering column and its name was Bozo. Van had lifted all Bozo’s seats except his and replaced them with orange shag carpeting and a mattress fitted with a tie-dyed sheet. He had the Jefferson Airplane on the eight track; Grace Slick wondered if he needed somebody to love. The answer was yes, thought Space. Yes, damn it! Lance was holding Cassie’s hand. Van checked the rearview mirror, then braked, pulled off the highway and drove along the shoulder, craning his head to the right. Finally he spotted an unmarked dirt track that divided a vast and unpromising nothingness in two.
“Where the fuck are we?” said Space.
“We’re either making a brief incursion into Cambodia,” said Van, “or we’re at the ass-end of Mishawaka, Indiana.” Van had the power of mobility. He and Bozo were one, a machine with a human brain. No matter how stoned the world turned, Van could navigate through it. No one demanded poetry or cosmic truths from Van; all they expected of him was to deliver.
“Looks like nowhere to me.”
“To the unenlightened eye, yes,” said Lance. “But check it out and you’ll see another frontier of human knowledge. Tripping is like doing science, Space. You can’t just lounge around your room anymore listening to Joni Mitchell and dreaming up laws of nature. You have to go out into the field and gather data in order to grok the universe. Study the stars and ponds, turn rocks over, taste the mushrooms, smoke some foliage.”
“Would someone take my boots off?” said Cassie.
“It’s freezing, man,” said Van. “Your feet will get cold.” As Bozo bumped down the track, the steering wheel kept squirming in his hands like a snake.
“I’ve got cold feet already.”
“Science is bullshit!” said Space. “Nothing but a government conspiracy to bring us down.” He slid across the shag carpet and rolled the right leg of Cassie’s jeans over an ankle-length black boot. “Like, if they hadn’t passed the law of gravity, we could all fly.”
Van laughed. “Maybe we could get Dicky Trick to repeal it.”
“Somebody should repeal that asshole,” said Cassie.
“Science is napalm,” said Space. “Science is plastic. It’s Tang.” He eased her boot off. She was wearing cotton socks, soft and nubbly.
“It’s the bomb,” said Lance.
“Are we going to the farm?” Cassie wiggled her toes in Space’s hand. “This is the way to the farm, isn’t it?”
Her foot reminded him of the baby rabbit that Katie McCauley had brought for show-and-tell in the sixth grade; he hadn’t wanted to put it down either. He pressed his thumb gently against her instep.
“You’ve never been to the farm, have you, Space?” said Lance. The road spat stones at Bozo’s undercarriage.
“He’s home,” said Van. “I can see lights, man.”
“Who?” Space said.
“Do you follow baseball?” Lance started to laugh.
#
The farm buildings sprawled across the land like a moonbathing giant. The barrel-chested body was a Quonset hut; a red silo arm saluted the stars. The weather-bitten face of the house was turned toward them; its narrow porch pouted. There were lights in the eyes, and much more light streaming from the open slider of the Quonset. Van parked next to a ’59 Studebaker Lark that had been driven to Mars and back. He opened his door, took a deep breath of the night and disappeared.
“Oh, wow!” They could hear him scrabbling on the ground. “I forget how to walk,” he said.
Space was the first to reach him. Van was doing a slow backstroke across the lawn toward the house. “For a moment there, man,” he said, “I could’ve sworn I had wheels.”
“Come on, you.” Lance motioned Space to grab Van’s shoulders and together they tried to lift him. “Get up.” It was like stacking Jell-O.
“No, no, no.” Van giggled. “I’m too wasted.”
“I’m so glad you waited until now to tell us,” said Lance. “How the hell do we get back to campus?”
“Oh, I’m cool to drive, man. I just can’t stand up.”
They managed to fold him back into the driver’s seat and Cassie slapped Big Brother into the eight track. Space glanced over to the Quonset and saw a silhouette on the canvas of light framed by the huge open doorway. For a moment a man watched—no, sensed him. When he sniffed the air, something feathered against Space’s cheek. Then the man ghosted back into the barn.
“Old Rog doesn’t seem very glad to see us,” said Lance.
The barn was fiercely lit—north of supermarket bright, just south of noon at the beach. The wildly colored equipment seemed to shimmer in the hard light. A golden reaper, a pink cultivator and a lobster-red baler were lined up beside a John Deere that looked like it had been painted in a tornado. The man had poked his head under its hood.
“Evening, Rog,” said Lance. “Space, this is Roger Maris.”
The man turned toward them; Space blinked. Roger Maris was wearing a pair of black jeans with a hole in the left knee and a greasy Yankee jersey over a gray sweatshirt. He stood maybe six feet tall and weighed a paunchy two hundred and change. He had that flattop crew-cut, all right, and the nose like a thumb, but Space wasn’t buying that he was Roger Maris. At least not the Roger Maris.
He’d been ten years old when Maris hit sixty-one home runs to break Babe Ruth’s record, but in 1961 Space and his parents had been National League fans. They lived in Sheboygan and followed the Milwaukee Braves. Space’s imagination had been more than filled by the heroics of Hank Aaron and Eddie Matthews; there was no room for damn Yankees. But then the Braves moved south in 1966 and Space had to accept the harsh reality that not only was God dead, but Warren Spahn was pitching in Atlanta. After that, he’d lost interest in baseball. He had no clue what had become of the Roger Maris since.
“Space?” Maris waved a socket wrench at him. “What the hell kind of name is Space?”
“Short for Space Cowboy,” said Cassie.
Maris considered this, then put the wrench down, wiped his left hand on the pinstriped jersey and offered it to Space. “A hat don’t make no cowboy,” he said.
They shook. “A shirt don’t make no ballplayer,” said Space.
Maris’s smile bandaged irritation. “What can I do you folks out of?” He gave Space a parting grip strong enough to crush stone.
“You got any more blue magic in your bag of tricks?” said Lance. “We’re thinking of going away for the weekend.”
“To where, Oz?” Maris shut his eyes; his lids were the color of the last olive in the jar. “Cowboy here ever done magic before?”
Now Space was annoyed; he was proud of his dope resume. “I’ve dropped Owsley, wedding bells and some two-way brown dot.”
“Practically Ken Kesey.” Cassie laughed. “And only a freshman.”
“That shit’s just acid,” said Maris. “Magic goes deeper.”
“He handled the first rush all right,” said Lance. “We all did.”
“You driving around with a head full of blue magic?” Maris frowned.
“Actually,” said Lance, “Van’s driving.”
But Maris wasn’t listening. He had closed his eyes again and kept them closed, his head cocked to one side as he received secret instructions from outer space. “It’s your funeral,” he said abruptly, and strode from the barn as if he’d just remembered he’d left the bath water running.
“I guess we scored.” Lance shrugged. “Hey Rog, wait up!” He paused at the door of the Quonset, glanced uncertainly at Cassie and Space and then plunged after Maris.
“What does he mean, our funeral?” Cassie had turned the color of a Saltine.
“Don’t ask me; I’m the rookie. Can’t you see these training wheels on my head?”
“Deeper? Deeper than what?”
Space put his arm around her shoulder and led her from the Quonset into the baleful night.
#
Pacing Roger Maris’s front parlor, Space remembered what Cassie had said about things getting disconnected. How could anyone deal acid and live in a place as square as a doctor’s waiting room? The wallpaper was Midwestern Hideous: golden, flag-bearing eagles flapped between Civil War cannons on a cream field. If he stared long enough, the blue magic animated the pattern for him. Madness, madness—and Norman Mailer wondered why we were in Viet Nam! Lance and Cassie waited for Maris on a long, low, brown couch in front of an oval rug braided in harvest colors. Cassie watched the brick fireplace in which four dusty birch logs were stacked. Nearby, a television the size of a Shetland pony was tethered to the wall socket.
Space couldn’t stand still. “ Where did you dig this loon up?”
“He found us.” Lance shot a quizzical look at Cassie. “After the Santana concert?”
She bit her lip and said, “Don’t talk to me. I’m not here.”
“Okay.” Lance was teeth-grindingly patient. “That’s cool.”
By the door, a heavy brass pot was filled by a man’s black umbrella and three baseball bats. “I mean, check this room,” said Space.
Lance laughed. “I keep expecting Wally Cleaver to materialize and ask if I want to sniff some glue.”
On waist high shelves beside a rocking chair were stacked a build-it-yourself Heathkit tuner, amp and turntable. Next to them was a rack of LPs. Space worried through them; they contradicted everything in the room. Maris had the rare nude version of John and Yoko’s Two Virgins, Weasels Ripped My Flesh by the Mothers of Invention, Moby Grape, everything by Quicksilver Messenger Service, Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, the Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow.
“Look at this!” Space waved a copy of Workingman’s Dead at Lance. “This is not Roger Maris—he’s not anyone. His pieces don’t fit together.”
Lance pointed silently at a framed Western Union telegram that hung beside a painting of Guernseys.
MY HEARTIEST CONGRATULATIONS TO YOU ON HITTING YOUR 61ST HOME RUN. THE AMERICAN PEOPLE WILL ALWAYS ADMIRE A MAN WHO OVERCOMES GREAT PRESSURE TO ACHIEVE AN OUTSTANDING GOAL.
JOHN F. KENNEDY.
“So?” Space didn’t know why it had become so important to him that this clyde wasn’t the famous ballplayer. “He could’ve got this anywhere—could’ve sent it to himself.” Everything seemed so slippery all of a sudden; he felt a familiar twinge of dread. Just when he’d finally figured the world out, he was afraid he might have to stop believing in something. Again. This was exactly how it had felt when he given up on baseball, Catholicism, America, love, Star Trek, college. What was it this time? The only illusions he had left were that nothing mattered, that acid was wisdom and that he was a wizard.
He heard Maris on the stairs and skittered back to the couch next to Cassie, who was still elsewhere.
“A dozen hits of magic.” Maris offered them a plastic baggie with a scatter of confetti clinging to the inside. Space took it. Each blotter was the size of a fingernail and was labelled with a blue ∞. “Sixty,” said Maris.
Lance pulled two twenties and a joint from his tee shirt pocket. “Want to smoke?” He liked to close deals with some ceremonial pot. He said it was the Indian way, and also helped detect narcs. While he lit up, Space counted out a ten, a five and five ones, and put an empty wallet back in his jeans.
Lance passed the joint to Maris, who took an impatient toke.
“You said this is deeper than acid.” Space jiggled the baggie. “What’s that supposed to mean, anyway?”
Cassie twitched and returned from the dark side of the moon.
“You take a trip, you come back, nothing really changes.” The smoky words curled out of his mouth. “This shit makes you become yourself faster, kind of hurries things along.”
“Something wrong with that?” said Cassie.
“Depends on who you’re supposed to be.” Maris tucked the wad of money into his jeans. “But if I was you kids, I’d take the long way to the future.” He offered her the joint; she waved it over to Space.
“Sounds like Timothy Leary bullshit to me.” Space took a deep, disgusted pull and immediately regretted it. Lance’s pot tasted like electrical fire; it was probably laced with Mr. Clean.
“Timothy Leary’s dead,” sang Lance. “So if I’m not myself, who am I? Marshall McLuhan? Abbie Hoffman?”
“You’re faking it, that’s what being young is all about. When you’re young, there ain’t all that much of you, so you pretend there’s more.”
“Hell, you’re the one preten—” Space couldn’t hold it in anymore; he was racked by a fit of coughing.
“Space,” said Cassie.
“You never hit sixty-one homers.” Space gasped; his head felt like it was filling with helium. “I bet you’ve never even been to Yankee Stadium.”
Maris’s face was hard as the Bible. “You want to see my license, Cowboy?” In the uneasy silence, he fetched an ashtray from the hi-fi shelf. “Me, I stayed young a long time, mostly because I never did nothing but play ball. Growing up ain’t something they really encourage in the bigs. When I got traded to the Yankees, I was just the kid who was going to play right field next to Mantle. I was MVP that season, ’60.” Talking about baseball seemed to calm him. He took another drag, ashed the joint and then offered it again to Cassie.
“Mantle?” This time she puffed politely.
“Mickey Mantle played center field,” said Lance. “Tell them about the home run.” Space wasn’t sure whether Lance really believed or was egging Maris on for a goof.
“That was the next year, when me and Mick hit all the homers. Only he got sick and I still didn’t have the record on the last day of the season. We were playing the Red Sox at the Stadium. By then a lot of people had given up, probably thought I didn’t have sixty-one in me. I remember it was a cool day but real bright, the sun beating down on all the empty seats. The fans who showed were jammed into the right field stands, just in case. The Sox started Tracy Stallard, a righty, fastball pitcher. I flied out to Yaz in the first but when I came up in the fourth …”
The contours of his body changed, as if the weight of the last nine years had fallen away.
“He started me with two balls away. Then the third pitch, he made a mistake, got too much of the plate. I was always a mistake hitter. I got a real good cut at it and then … I just stood and watched. It landed near the bullpen, about ten rows into the stands, people scrambling after it. There was a fog of noise; it was like I couldn’t find my way around the bases. When I got back to the dugout, Blanchard and Skowron and Lopez wouldn’t let me in, they were blocking the top step, making me go back out into the noise. That was the problem, I couldn’t never find my way out of that god-damned noise.”
“Is that why you left baseball?” asked Cassie
“Nah.” Maris closed his eyes again; he was definitely listening to something. “Nah, it’s ’cause I ain’t a kid anymore.” Suddenly he looked spent; Space could see a looseness under the chin. “I’m thirty-six years old.”
“That’s still pretty young,” said Cassie.
“Well then, there’s this.” He rolled up the gray sweatshirt, uncovering his left forearm. A scar, smooth and white as the belly of a snake, sliced from the ball of his thumb up toward the elbow. “The VC likes to rig these homemade mines, see. Couple of fragmentation grenades with the spoons attached to a tripwire. Me and Luther Nesson were walking point outside of Da Lat and the poor bastard stepped into one. Died in a splatter and left me a souvenir. A chunk of shrapnel chewed on my palmaris longus muscle and severed a couple of tendons.”
Space contemplated the wound with vast relief; for a moment back there, Maris had almost convinced him. Now he felt a grudging admiration for Maris’s creativity, his devotion to detail, the weight of his portrayal—the man had elevated lunacy to an art. And of course the Nam angle made it all the more poignant. Space imagined that, if he had seen what Maris had seen, he might well be strumming a ukulele and warbling like Tiny Tim.
“Bummer.” Lance stubbed the roach out and took the baggie. “Hey, we better go check on Van, make sure he didn’t float away.” He stood. “So anyway, thanks, man.” He reached for Cassie’s hand.
“What’s happening?” Cassie scooted away from him and bumped into Space. “We’re going already? What about the rest of the story?”
Maris waved at the parlor. “Sister, you’re looking at it.”
Outside, Van was amusing himself by flashing a light show against the side of the farmhouse while he sang along to Sergeant Pepper. High beam-low beam-right blinker-off-low beam-left blinker. “… the girl with kaleidoscope eyes.” He had a voice like a loose fan belt.
Maris followed them onto the porch and watched, flickering in the headlights. As Cassie ducked into Bozo, Maris called out. “Cowboy! How much you want for the hat?”
“Huh?”
“Pay no attention,” Lance hissed. “Just get in.”
“It’s not for sale.” Space stepped away from Bozo.
“Sixty bucks says it is.”
Space tugged at the brim; he had almost forgotten he was wearing it. He started back toward Maris. It wasn’t much of a hat—Space had stepped on it many times, spilled Boone’s Farm Apple Wine on it, watched as one of Lenny Kemmer’s Winstons had burned a hole in the black felt crown. “Is this some kind of joke?”
Van killed the lights and Beatles. Lance and Cassie deployed on either side of Bozo.
Maris came to the top of the porch steps. “You got doubts,” he said. “You think I’ve been shitting you all night.”
When Space tried to deny it, his tongue turned to peanut butter.
“Hell, Cowboy, you don’t believe in nothing.”
“So?”
“So I want to buy the hat.” Maris came down the first step. “For a experiment.” Second step. “And you gotta help.” Bottom step. “Sixty.” He unfolded the wad of bills and thrust them at Space.
“Hey, Rog,” said Lance. “He’s just a kid. Leave him alone.”
Abraham Lincoln gazed up at Space, appraising the quality of his courage.
“What kind of experiment?” said Cassie.
“Scientific. Cowboy and me are going to measure something.”
Space nipped the money without speaking and offered Maris the hat.
Maris clapped him on the shoulder. “You just hold onto that for now.” He turned Space toward the Quonset. “See that barn? How far would you say it is?”
As Space peered into night, the Quonset receded and then flowed back toward him. “I don’t know. Fifty, sixty feet?”
“More like a hundred, but that’s okay. Now you’re gonna stand in that doorway and get a good tight grip on the brim.” He raised Space’s arm. “Hold it to one side, just like that. Arm’s length.”
“Space.” Cassie slipped between them. “Give him back his money and let’s get out of here.”
Maris brushed past her and surveyed the shrubbery along the porch. He poked by a couple of crewcut yews, a rhododendron in bud, a forsythia already gone by.
Cassie kept insisting. “Time to go, man.” Like she was his mother.
The edge of the garden was defined by a row of smooth beach stones, painted white. Maris knelt with a grunt and hefted one the size of a peach, only flatter and more egg-shaped.
“Everyone remembers me for the homers, but I could play the field too.” He brushed dirt off the stone. “Won a Gold Glove, you know. Didn’t nobody stretch a single on Roger Maris.”
“Jesus God,” said Cassie, “what are you morons trying to prove? That your balls are bigger than your brains?”
That summed it up nicely, thought Space. Maris was playing a testosterone game with his head. Space was at once a creature of the game and a spectator. A poor nervous physics major sat in the stands, watching in horror, while Space Cowboy was grooving on a Grade A adrenaline high. And why not? He was a nineteen-year-old wizard whose power was that nothing could touch him, nothing could stop him. He looked over at Lance, who was pale as the moon. “Right on!” Space said.
He counted the paces off: thirty-nine, forty, forty-one. Forty-two to the Quonset’s open doorway—figure three feet to a pace, so let’s see, three times two was six and three times four was twelve—was that right? He had won his high school’s Math Medal back in the Pleistocene. A hundred and twenty-six feet was just about the distance from third base to first. He bowed, flourished the hat to Cassie and then held it up in his moist, outstretched hand.
Maris turned at a right angle to the Quonset; he held the stone behind him, just off the hip. He scowled at the hat over his front shoulder and then paused. He shut his eyes and listened to the howl of the Dog Star long enough for a bead of sweat to dribble from Space’s arm pit. Then Maris nodded, reared back and strode quickly forward—open your eyes, goddamnit! His arm snapped past his ear and the stone came screaming at Space like the headlamp of God’s own Harley—or maybe it was Space who screamed, he couldn’t tell, he couldn’t move, his entire future had collapsed into an egg-shaped stone and time stopped and for an eternity he thought what a fucking waste and then time resumed with a sneeze and the hat spun him halfway around but he held on to it and something thwocked against the concrete floor of the Quonset and again, thwocka-thwocka-thwok! For a moment there was utter silence, which drummed in his ears like the finale of the 1812 Overture. Space whispered, “Out of sight,” and giggled. Then he shouted so the others could hear. “OUT OF SIGHT!”
Space was surprised that the stone hadn’t ripped off the top of the hat but instead had come through the pinch on the front side, leaving a hole big enough for Lance to put his fist through. Lance handed it to Van who offered it to Cassie who wanted no part of it. “Are you boys about through?” Her voice was a fistful of nails.
“Yeah,” said Lance. “Time to cruise.”
Van brought the hat to Maris, who was kneading his biceps. Maris stared right through him. “See what magic can do, Cowboy?” His smile had no teeth in it. “You can make yourself into a star, if that’s who you’re supposed to be.”
“Mr. Maris,” said Space, opening his wallet. “How much for that hat?”
#
Van, Space and Lance staggered out of Kresge’s and across the parking lot, laughing. The cashier had rung up the eight cans of Rust-Oleum—two each of red, yellow, green and black—the one pound bag of Fritos, the four Almond Joys, the six packages of Fun Tyme Balloons, the dozen rolls of crepe ribbon, the two packs of Teaberry gum and then, as the register stuck out its paper tongue at her, she had asked them who the party was for. When Lance had said, “President Nixon, ma’am,” she was so transparently croggled that it was all Space could do to keep from dropping to his belly and barking like a seal.
Cassie, who had been waiting for them in Bozo, didn’t see what was so funny, but then she hadn’t eaten that second blotter of blue magic, either. Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters had a saying: you were either on the bus or off. Space was no telepath, but it occurred to him that Cassie might be about to stand up and pull the signal cord for her stop.
“She’s probably calling the cops on us right now,” Cassie said.
“For what, indecent composure?” said Lance. “Chortling in a No Humor Zone?”
“How about possession? You’ve got Space here mooning around in a cowboy hat with a frontal lobotomy and you two are so wasted you’re tripping over gum spots on the parking lot.” She shook her head. “You guys are dangerous, you know that?”
“Only to ourselves.” Van swerved Bozo around an oncoming Vega and roared onto the highway, headed back toward campus. “Break out the chips.”
They crunched to themselves for a few moments. Space was glad that Cassie was no longer freaking out, only now she had turned so fucking sensible that she was stretching his nerves. They were tripping, ferchrissakes; this was no time to be responsible. “How about some tunes?” he said.
Van turned on the radio.
… of student protests continued today in the wake of President Nixon’s decision to send troops into Cambodia. In Maryland, Governor Marvin Mandel has put the National Guard on alert after two days of unrest on the campus …
“I said tunes!” Space leaned forward to punch a selector button.
“Shh, listen.” Lance yanked him back.
And at Kent State University in Ohio, a fire of undetermined origin swept through the ROTC building this evening. Firemen responding to the blaze were hampered by students throwing rocks and cutting hoses.
“Hey, man,” said Van. “Maybe we should go after ROTC too.”
“Earlier today, a group of two thousand students marched through downtown Kent, prompting local officials to order a dawn-to-dusk …”
“No,” Lance said. “That’s where they’ll be expecting trouble. Besides, we’ve got the key to O’Shag.”
“This whole gig is bogus.” Cassie nudged the paper K-Mart sack with her boot. “It’s not going to accomplish anything, except maybe get us arrested.”
“Hey, we’re going wake up this fucking campus,” Space said.
“Fucking ay!” said Van.
“Shake the jocks out of their beds.”
“Right on, man, right on!” Van pumped his fist.
“Light a fire under old Hesburgh.”
“Tell it, brother!” Van leaned on the horn.
“Lay off, you guys,” said Lance. “Cassie, you heard the radio. People all over the country are protesting. We’ve got a chance to make a statement here.”
“With balloons and spray paint?”
“Better than guns and bombs.” Lance rested his hand on her knee. “You thought it was cool before.”
“That wasn’t me, that was the acid.”
Turning to sports, Dust Commander has won the Kentucky Derby. A fifteen-to-one shot …
She rested her cheek against the window. “Look, I’m going to graduate in a couple of weeks. I’m too old to be playing Wendy to your Lost Boys. Maybe I should just go back to the dorm and crash.”
And in the American League, the Angels beat the Red Sox, 8-4, it was the Yankees 7, the Brewers 6 …
Space fingered the hole in his hat and wondered if he had it in him to be a star.
#
Van sauntered toward the main entrance to O’Shaughnessy Hall. The liberal arts building was one of largest and ugliest on campus, a stack of four Gothic Revival ice cube trays with a yellow brick veneer. Cassie, Space and Lance watched from the chill shadows as Van waltzed innocently up to the door, tried it as if he’d expected O’Shag to be open at 11:34 on a Saturday night, shrugged and cruised on.
“Of course, if it wasn’t locked, we wouldn’t be breaking and entering.” Cassie made no effort to keep her voice down. “Jerry Rubin would have to take points off.”
Lance had used his wizard power to talk Cassie into sticking with them, but Space wasn’t sure it had been his swiftest move of the evening. Doubt was contagious, especially when your feet were wet. They had left Bozo in student parking and stolen across the tidy greens of the campus, weighting their shoes with spring dew. The night was getting colder; Space could see his breath plume. He ground his teeth to keep them from chattering. It took Van forever to circle back to them.
They slunk around to O’Shag’s smaller north entrance, checking for any signs of activity inside. The classrooms were all dark but that didn’t mean some English professor might not be late-nighting in one of the windowless offices, slugging Jim Beam and writing poems about English professors for the Dead Tree Review. This time the others stayed behind while Space approached the door, clutching Balls’s key. It wasn’t until he was fitting it into the lock that he realized there might be an alarm. He looked back at the others in a panic but they were no help. Neither were the stars, some of which were flashing blue like the cherry on a cop car. He could almost hear the Pleiades shrilling at him as he tried to turn the key to the right. It wouldn’t budge. He thought the moon’s alarm would sound deeper and more reproachful, like a foghorn. He turned the key left and the dead bolt clicked. Moon, spoon, you fucking loon. He pushed against the door and it swung open, dumping him into O’Shaughnessy Hall.
He went through a dimly lit stairwell to the long, dark hall of the first floor. The block walls on either side were pierced by wooden doors. Space could not make out the far end. Although he had passed this way every Monday, Wednesday and Friday for eight months, Space felt lost. The place he knew and hated teemed with sound and light and bodies. This one was empty, silent as a dream and all the doors were closed, creating an odd pressure in the hall, as if the building were holding its breath.
He heard a door tick open, a squeak of sneakers against the rubber mat in the stairwell, the whisper of corduroy pants. Lance said that the reason Van always wore corduroys was that he needed more texture in his life.
“In here,” said Space.
“No lights?” Van peered .
“No.”
They joined Lance and Cassie in the stairwell. Lance knelt in a corner of the stairwell and handed out supplies from the K-Mart bag. “We’ll each take a floor,” he said. “Fifteen minutes and out.”
“But what should we say, man?” asked Van.
“Like I said, just make a statement,” said Lance. “It’s your life and their war.”
Cassie waved off a package of balloons. “Keep the party favors.” She went up the stairs with a can of Rust-Oleum in each hand.
“Bring the empties back and no fingerprints, okay?” said Lance. “Fifteen minutes—let’s do it!” He and Van took the stairs two at a time.
Space sprayed a blue peace sign on the door to Room 160 but was strangely unconvinced by it. Then what kind of statement did he have in him? He immediately regretted the fuck Nixon; it was obvious as air. Hell no, we won’t go sprawled the entire length of Room 149 and came to a disappointing conclusion on 147. Room 141 read Out now. He took a balloon from of his pocket, blew it up and almost fainted but managed to hold it pinched between thumb and forefinger. Out of where? Cambodia? Viet Nam? Notre Dame? Instead of tying the balloon, Space let it go and it leapt, hissing, from his hand. He wrote revolution on the east wall, make love not war on the west, then left them to futile debate. He was now deep into the hall; the visibility was less than a class in either direction. He could feel the future watching as he wrote acid test on Room 133. Pale secondhand moonlight glimmered through the tall wire-reinforced glass slits in each door. 125 said, God is dead. Long red runs dribbled from the “o” in God, like blood from the crown of thorns. Was proclaiming the demise of the deity a political statement? Maris 61/61 on 117. That would leave the campus fuzz scratching their balls even though Old Rog had proved that it was cool to talk the talk, man, just as long as you can walk the walk. But Space still couldn’t see the end of the fucking hall.
At that moment, something splatted on his cheek. Space swiped at it, thinking it might be his own sweat. The finger came away dry; he could feel his skin tighten in fear. Pa-chuk.
“Hey!”
Pa-chuk, pa-chuk. The two drops hit his left arm like marbles on a snare drum and he spun wildly away. Pa-chuk. Space moaned and started to run. A phantom storm in the middle of O’Shaugnessey Hall was hairy enough, but these weren’t just polite raindrops. They were big and cold and rude as eggs. Pa-chuk.
And this was it, he realized: the bummer he had helped Cassie dodge was seething all around him and he knew he had to get out, get out, that he had been wandering blindly and without purpose down this hallway ever since he had come to Notre Dame papa-chuk but he could no longer go back to his parents and Sheboygan and Cathy, that lying bitch pa-chuk but there was no sense in going any farther because the hallway stretched on to some distant and unknowable infinity and besides, he had to get the hell out, which was when the doors began to vibrate and the light of insight came knifing through the long, thin windows and he saw the hall with the same acid clarity with which he had heard the filament of a sixty-watt bulb riffing about the mysterious energy that abided in all life, only now he could sense a new secret papa-chuk: that there was no future in wandering down an empty hall, that in order to find his life he would have to choose where to expend his energy. Pick a door, damn it. Room 110 was right in front of him, but it was even and Space knew he had to be odd. He about-faced; nothing could stop him. The doorknob of 109 was warm as a kiss.
Space put a hand to his forehead to shield his eyes. Sunlight poured through windows which framed snow-covered mountains. The sky was the blue of heaven; the snow on the ground glistened. He had entered a classroom all right, but it obviously wasn’t in the same corner of reality as South Bend, Indiana.
A balding man stood behind the head desk and typed with two fingers—the teacher, Space assumed. He was wearing suede cowboy boots, black pants, a denim work shirt buttoned to the neck and—holy shit, the dude had a gold earring!
He did not seem to notice Space.
Neither did the students now filing in behind him. They seemed too young to be in college; they had that stunned glaze of high school seniors—except that some of them had tattoos. The sides of one girl’s head had been shaved to a gunmetal shadow. A boy in a flannel shirt had on the flimsiest headphones Space had ever seen; they were attached to a transistor radio hooked to the kid’s belt. Walkman—the word sprang unbidden to his mind. Walk the walk, man.
Space’s first instinct was to bolt from the room, or at least slouch like a student behind a desk in the back, but instead he approached the teacher. As he got closer he saw that the squashed typewriter had no paper in it, that it wasn’t any kind of machine Space had ever seen before, but then there was another strange word melting on his tongue like a lifesaver—laptop. It was a funny word and he might have laughed, except that he had by now come too close to the teacher, close enough so that he could wiggle his toes inside the man’s boots, so close that he could jingle the keys to an ’88 Dodge Caravan in his front pants pocket and, in the back pocket, feel the bulk of a wallet not-quite-filled with thirty-eight dollars and a NatWest Visa card with an unpaid balance of $3,734.80 on which he was paying a 9.9 percent APR and a California driver’s license and a picture of a pretty little blonde girl named Kaitlin, so impossibly close that he could feel the weight of a single gold band around the fourth finger of his left hand and remember Judy’s breath feathering against his neck after she kissed him goodbye that morning.
The bell rang and the class came to what passed for attention at Memorial High.
“Good morning, people.” He turned to the board and scrawled, 1st law of thermodynamics in handwriting which was almost as legible as an EKG scan. He faced the class again. “Can anyone tell me what this is?”
He was astonished to see Ben Strock with his hand up. Most days the kid sat looking as if he had just been hit in the head with a shovel, even though he was pulling down a B+. “Yes, Ben?”
“Uh … bathroom pass, Mr. Casten.”
Jack Casten waved him from the room. “Anyone else?”
Of course, Feodor Papachuk raised his hand. Fucking suck-up, thought the part of Jack Casten that was still Space Cowboy and always would be. “Go ahead, Feodor.”
“The first law of thermodynamics,” said Feodor Papachuk, “is that energy can neither be created or destroyed but may be changed from one form to another.”