17

OK, SO maybe a week goes by and one afternoon I’m doing my usual scrape-your-brains-back-together routine—a coffee and a smoke and peering out the window to make sure that the US Marine Corps hasn’t showed up on our front steps, and I see this little blue Mini pull up and park right behind the narks. And a chick gets out of it, and she’s contemplating our house, and I say to Lorraine, “Hey, check the action.”

Lorraine says, “Wow, she’s sure in the wrong neighborhood.” And the chick walks up the steps and knocks at our door. Lorraine and I exchange looks, like, OK, so what’s coming down on us NOW?

I open the door, and I immediately detect the fact that the chick’s something else. Like if you said “good looking,” that don’t even start. She’s gorgeous—a tall skinny blond, definitely the cool and collected type. I can’t get her number. She’s obviously got class. It’s not like she’s all dressed up or anything—just jeans and a white blouse and a pair of those dead-eye silver sunglasses—and I’m still going, what the fuck? And she takes off her sunglasses, and she’s got these absolutely HUGE blue eyes, and all of a sudden I know her. Of course I do. I’ve only spent like a million hours laying on that foamie at John’s old place with her looking down at me. “Hey, Zoë,” I say, “what’s happening?”

And she says, “Oh. How did you . . . ?”

And I say, “Easy, honey bun, I’ve caught your act in the funny papers.”

By that time, Cassandra’s showed up. She comes bouncing down the stairs and dribbles to a stop.

Zoë lets out this big squeal and runs over and gives Cassandra a big hug and kisses her on both cheeks and launches into this speed rap, about how ugly the traffic was, and it took JUST FOREVER, and she had a little trouble finding our place, like it’s not obvious how the streets run in Boston, and wow, are Boston drivers ever nuts, and, yeah, she probably should have called first but it was a spur-of-the moment thing, “I just said to Linda . . . at the agency, you know . . . ‘I just can’t take any more. Cancel all my bookings.’” And she absolutely HAD to be back Sunday night because she had an UTTERLY CRUSHING shoot bright and early Monday morning, some fancy-ass lingerie company, and she HAD NEVER BEEN SO FATIGUÉ IN HER ENTIRE VIE, which I thought was a riot, but all Cassandra did was stand there.

Well, I introduced myself, and I introduced Lorraine, and I did the welcome-to-Boston number, and finally Cassandra emerges from her zombie-like state and says, kind of grim, “Hey, Zo, great to see you. You bring anything with you? Tom, why don’t you help her with her suitcase?”

So I bring her suitcase in for her, and I make damned sure that she locks her car, and then we go upstairs and go strolling into our bedroom. Since we’d got ourselves SIMPLIFIED, the décor in there is what Cassandra calls ZEN. Zoë does a couple blinks at that one, but she takes it all in stride, and she allows as how what she would like more than anything in the world right now is a long hot bath.

Once we’ve got Zoë stashed away in the bathroom, Cass about goes nuts on me. “Jesus, what the fuck is she doing here? Should have called first, my fucking ass. How did she get our address? I never gave her our address. She must have got it from the old man. Oh, great. Oh, fucking marvelous. She’s up here checking me out. Jesus, she’s a motherfucking SPY. She’s been a little spy since she was four years old. SHOULD HAVE CALLED FIRST, YEAH FUCKING RIG HT. Jesus, Tommy, WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO WITH HER?”

I say, “Hey, horse, what is this WE shit?” I just couldn’t help it. Like we were still sleeping in the same bed—when she bothered to come home—but that was about it. I mean it was getting ridiculous.

Cassandra says, “Oh, Tommy, for Christ’s sake, HELP ME. I know everything’s fucked, man, but please, don’t give me any grief right now. I REALLY NEED YOU.”

Well, what could I say to that? So all of a sudden the world has become filled with problems, and they’re MY problems. For starters—where is little sister going to sleep? There’s three bedrooms in the Shooting Gallery—ours, and Garvin and Lorraine’s, and the famous THIRD BEDROOM. We haven’t checked it out lately, so we take a look.

There’s empty pizza boxes and gnawed-on chicken bones and various other items that are difficult to identify but used to be edible once long ago, and a million cigarette butts, and four hundred million roaches, and like a dozen empty cough syrup bottles, and a weird assortment of clothes, including a shirt with lots of blood on one of the sleeves, and a whole bunch of filthy blankets. And if you’ve even been in a pet shop where nobody gives a shit, like where they’ve got puppies and kitties and birdies and monkeys and snakes all crammed into little bitty cages that nobody’s bothered to clean for a while—that’s what that place smells like.

We just back off and shut the door. “Tommy,” Cassandra says, “we’re living like pigs.”

“Hey,” I say, “that could be the name of a movie. You know, one of those foreign jobs. LIVE LIKE PIGS.”

But she ain’t up for the humor. We’ve got to contemplate every possible location where little sister might catch a few Zs. “How about John’s?” Cass says—because he was still crashed at Pamela the Great’s and he kept it real nice—but no, she says, “that would be AWKWARD,” and shit, we wouldn’t want that, would we? Goddamn, we can’t have AWKWARD.

So we contemplate the two of us crashing in the living room with the skagheads and giving Zoë our room, and that’s a fairly horrible contemplation. And we contemplate finding Zoë a good hotel, but that wouldn’t be like, you know, hospitable. And the final result of all this contemplation is that Cass and Zoë will crash in the bed in our room, and I will crash in the camper. “So go get the camper,” Cass says.

I hustle my ass six blocks over to get the camper, and I bring it back, and Cass zips down and rummages around in the big chest the skagheads never figured out how to crack open yet, and she gets out all these sheets and pillow cases and blankets left over from when she was doing DOMESTIC, and we make up our bed just as pretty as a picture, and we call up John because Zoë just ABSOLUTELY has to see him. He’s kind of blown away, but he says, yeah, he’d be DELIGHTED to come out and have dinner with us, and Zoë says, “Should I change into something nice?”

And Cassandra says, “No, no, the way you are is just fine. DRESS DOWN.”

Now we’ve got to figure out where we’re going to catch the grub, and that leads us to another round of contemplation, and that requires a little weed. Zoë’s not what you’d call a confirmed pothead, but she does take an itsy bitsy teensy weensy little toke every time the joint floats by her. “Maybe that Mafia place,” Cass says, like the one Imhoff took her to, but Zoë says, “Pasta? Oh, God. I just inhale the steam, and I gain a pound. All I need’s a steak and a salad. You must know HUNDREDS of places. Nothing chi-chi, just a NICE place.”

Well, sure, we know HUNDREDS of places like that, you bet, especially with John being a heavy-duty no-exceptions vegetarian. Luckily Lorraine jumps in at this point. She knows the perfect NICE place. It’s where they used to go and catch the grub when she was married to that asshole Carl. “Right downtown. Family-style. Real quiet.”

We pick up John, and Zoë leaps out of the camper to do her squeal and kisses on the cheeks for him, and I know John could always use a pinch of weed so we do another J, and Zoë says, “Is there any time when you guys DON’T smoke?” and we get to Mama Whosiewhatsit’s, and like Lorraine said, it’s quiet and it’s NICE.

To kick things off right, Zoë and John are having themselves big glasses of cold clear water. And Zoë orders up a filet mignon rare with a Caesar salad—the dressing on the side. And John orders up some corn bread—hold the butter—and a side of carrots and a side of broccoli and a plate of beans—no, not the BOSTON BAKED BEANS but some damn kind of beans associated with the death of no animals. But Cass and me have got the munchies, and we’re already heavy into the import beer, and we decide to split the super-humungous family-sized barbequed ribs, so here’s these two parakeets pecking away, and Cass and me are going at it like a couple of prime hogs.

Well, John has been just sitting there staring at Zoë with AWE AND AMAZEMENT. Like maybe he’d got so used to her up on his wall that the real thing was just too much for him. But Zoë’s a nice girl—you could tell that—and she’s doing her best, so she asks me what I do. God, it’s been forever since anybody’s asked me that. “I’m in the import and retail business,” I tell her, and Cassandra gives this little snort. I put on my wow-am-I-ever-important voice, and I go, “I do mainly Mexican imports. I’m particularly favorable to products from the Michoacan region.”

Zoë glances over at John’s shirt. Since he turned into a skinny vegetarian, he’s been impersonating a Mexican farm worker, and it fits him somehow. “Oh,” she says, “they make some lovely things. And it’s all IN right now. I don’t know how many shoots I’ve done with the ethnic look. What do you import? Shirts? Skirts? Serapes?”

Cassandra just about loses it. And John says, “He’s putting you on, Zo. He’s a dope dealer.”

And Zoë blushes. Like bright pink. And all of a sudden I can see why the photographer dudes must love her because her eyes just go FLASH, and it’s the kind of thing when you see it, you think, shit, that girl ought to be in a magazine. She’s going, “Oh, you guys are just so cool. You’re just too cool for words,” and she says to me, “They’ve been doing that to me ever since I was a kid. And I always fall for it. Every damn time. I never learn.”

We had us a good yuck about that, and things started to loosen up, and Cass and Zoë swapped a few yarns about doing the sister act in the olden days, and then John all of a sudden emerges from his AWESTRUCK SILENCE and starts asking Zoë about the modeling biz, and one thing leads to another, and pretty soon we’re having ourselves one hell of a good time. So we get the dinner stuffed down, and we decide to move the show over to John’s place. Yep, that one’s safe—a damned sight better bet than taking Zoë back to the Shooting Gallery.

We walk into John’s, and Zoë goes bananas over THE DÉCOR. She’s complimenting John on his EXQUISITE TASTE. Well, all of that EXQUISITE TASTE belongs to Pamela the Great, and I know that, and Cass knows that, and you better believe John knows that, but Zoë don’t know that, and we’re not about to tell her. And we do a little more smoke, and then the three of them go off on a nostalgia number straight back to West Virginia—like the Old Folks at Home, right?—and that gets us on through with zero disasters.

I don’t know what Cassandra’s problem was with her little sister. You’d expect a model from New York to be like . . . well, like a model from New York. But Zoë wasn’t like that—anyhow, not after she mellowed out a bit—and it had been forever since I’d rapped with somebody as straight as her, and it felt good in a weird way, like stepping back into an old movie. We had us some exceedingly fine dope, and I started flashing on a whole bunch of things. Like how I hadn’t really integrated myself back into civilian life—and that old movie, the one I’d just stepped back into, the one with people like Zoë in it, well, that’s what you call CIVILIAN LIFE, and this weird scene where I’d been living in Boston was just more of THE WAR EFFORT.

We’re sitting on the floor, and Cassandra’s flopped back on me, like in the crook of my arm, and I’m thinking, hey, cupcake, ain’t you laying it on a bit thick? Like the last I heard, you was telling me that all the men in the world should be shoving their pricks up drainpipes. But she was playing couple for her sister, and I was playing right along with her, and I got to thinking, hey, why the fuck AREN’T we a couple? Because I was getting that old feeling like when we first got together.

And that got me to thinking about Margaret Teresa Flaherty. You remember her? That’s the chick I’m supposed to be leaving town with. Well, she was prettier than Cassandra, and she was better in bed than Cassandra—except if you count THE LAST TIME—and she was damned near as smart as Cassandra, but I never felt like I could be myself with her the way I was with Cassandra. There was, I don’t know, just some kind of vibe with me and Cassandra that felt right, but with Terry . . . Like if I was really going back home with somebody, I figured Cassandra would get the joke about Hubbard, North Dakota, right away, but I didn’t think Terry would ever get it. And just who the hell was Margaret Teresa Flaherty anyway? THE CATHOLIC CHURCH ON ACID, that’s who she was. So, yeah, her show was highly entertaining, but it wasn’t my show. And what about me and Cassandra? Well, you know, LOVE is a word you shouldn’t be throwing around too easy, but I’m thinking, shit, why did THE LAST TIME have to be the last time?

• • •

SO ANYHOW, that took care of little sister, day one. And then her and Cass caught the Zs in our bed, and the next day we shoved Zoë in the camper and picked up John to ease the old social strain—like we wouldn’t want things to be AWKWARD, would we?—and we drove all over hell and gone like we was motherfucking tour guides. Yep, that killed off many an hour, and we’re back at the Shooting Gallery getting our act together for the evening and the phone decides to ring. Lorraine yells up at me, “Hey, Tom, it’s for you.”

That call was right on time, you might say. If you didn’t know better, you’d think it was directed by one of those COSMIC FORCES. It’s Lyons. “Guess who’s dropped by to see me?” he says. “It’s the chef himself.”

“Oh, is that right?” I say. I’m pretty sure I’m talking over two tapped lines.

“Right as rain,” he says, “and twice as lovely. Yeah, we’re having us a fine time, my friend. I’d strongly suggest that you get your ass over here.”

“Lyons,” I say, “I can’t make it. I’m with PEOPLE.”

“Oh, you’re with PEOPLE, are you? Jesus fuck, man, that’s wonderful news. That’s the best news I’ve heard yet, and I’ve heard plenty. You grab those PEOPLE and you get your ass over here, like prontissimo. The more the merrier, you dig? Yeah, we’re having us a motherfucking PARTY. And Tommy? One never knows what weird shit might be going down in one’s absence, do one? Yeah, man, YOU BETTER GET YOUR MOTHERFUCKING ASS OVER HERE.”

My first thought was that Lyons could get bent, but my second thought was, hell, wait a minute, things over at Lyons’ place could get fairly bizarre fairly fast—and I was Lyons’ partner, wasn’t I? And so it probably behooved me to attempt to impose my bit of sanity on the events as they were unfolding. So I lay it on Cassandra, “You and John do something with Zoë. I got to go see Lyons.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Tommy, don’t give me that shit.”

“Look, babyshake, I don’t want to go into the gory details, but I don’t have a lot of choice in the matter.”

So we bat it back and forth for a while, and she says, “Well, fuck, man, we’ll ALL go over there.”

“I don’t think that’s what’s happening,” I say. But I’m thinking, hey, you know that’s not a bad idea. If there’s a whole bunch of people at Lyons’ place, they’re WITNESSES, you dig? And that puts some kind of limit on the bizarre shit right off the top. But I can’t figure out where Cassandra is at. “You must be putting me on,” I say. “You want to take YOUR SISTER to Bobby Lyons’ place?”

She gets this evil little glint in her eyes and she says, “Shit, man, she wants to see the scene in Boston? Well, ain’t that the scene?”

• • •

“WHAT THE fuck are we doing here?” John said. He had backed himself into a far corner in this huge, brilliantly lit, baby-blue space-age kitchen—had just found himself there with his arms folded tightly across his chest, his hands pressed into his armpits. It was something you did if you were cold, but he was so stoned he couldn’t tell if it was ordinary cold or only an evil head-trip cold.

“I don’t know about you, old buddy,” Tom was saying, still peering in the fridge, “but I’m just trying to catch the grub.”

There were times, especially these days, when John shouldn’t be smoking dope—certainly not this intense, no-nonsense Panamanian Red—but he’d been sucking at every passing joint like a dying man on an inhalator. He’d arrived there tonight, to this particular version of nowhere, apparently to play a bit role in some incomprehensible farce staged by Bob Lyons, and he loathed Bob Lyons. He wanted to be with Zoë, but he was still stuck in the kitchen, and it seemed he was going to remain stuck for just as long as Tom remained stuck. He walked over and stared into the fridge. Now they were both standing there like idiots, staring into the fridge. “Shit,” Tom said. “The motherfucker usually treats his guests better than this.”

“There’s eggs.”

“Fuck eggs. You got to cook the eggs.”

John was unaccountably angry. “Jesus, man, you’re hopeless.” He grabbed the carton out of the fridge, pulled down an enormous blue bowl from the cupboard and began cracking eggs into it. “What the fuck’s he doing with that gun?”

“Playing badass,” Tom said.

“But he’s talking like he’s going to kill him.”

“Fuck,” Tom said.

John had lost count of the eggs, but it looked like plenty. He beat the hell out of them with a fork, found a frying pan easily enough, and even a bottle of safflower oil. “Fuck?” John said.

“OK, now listen up, old buddy, because I’m giving you the straight scoop. If he was going to kill him, would he do it with all of us watching him?”

John looked into Tom’s toothy grin, saw that an answer was expected. Yup, if the straight-man didn’t set you up, you couldn’t do the next gag. “That wouldn’t make any sense,” John said.

“Well, sense is maybe just a fraction more than we should be asking for, but let’s just say we got to put some limit on things, you dig?”

John had lost it again. Limit? Limit?— Oh, cheese, that’s what he should be thinking about. John found a block of cheddar, neatly wrapped. Who did all the neat tidying up and putting away around here? No way it could be Lyons. Probably the silent girlfriend. She was in the living room, coloring in a coloring book.

Tom had been talking. What was he saying? “OK, before you get too sympathetic to innocent old Peter in there, let me tell you something about that miserable little prick. He burned Lyons good. Ripped him off and brought the fucking heat down on his ass. Ain’t that one against the revolution?”

The oil was hot enough. John poured the eggs into the frying pan. He loved the sound of the hiss. He turned the heat down. “The thing you got to remember about Lyons,” Tom was saying, “is he’s a dealer. The main thing he wants is his bread back . . . well, as much of it as he can get anyway. And he’s going to do what it takes . . . like by any means necessary, you dig?”

John grated cheese directly onto the cooking eggs. Saw a pepper grinder on a shelf, cranked that into the pan a few times. Saw the spice bottles, added some tarragon. He put the lid on. All that was required now was patience.

“You following everything I’m laying down so far?” Tom said. “Like what we’re going to see is one hell of a good show. And when old Bobby Lyons gets done, it’s going to be a cold fucking day in July before Peter sells anybody out again. Yeah, most likely Lyons will scare him right out of the dope trade, which is just fine. Yeah, like afterwards Peter can go back home to mommy and daddy and be whatever it was they wanted him to be and have lots of war stories to tell his kids about his crazy days in Boston back in the bad old days. You getting the picture?”

“Yeah, I’m getting the picture.” John flipped the omelet. Sometimes he was so good at dumb things like this that somebody should give him a medal.

“But another thing you might consider,” Tom said. “The way things are coming down at the moment, maybe you ought to remove little sister from the premises before it gets any more hilarious.”

• • •

LITTLE SISTER? Right. Every time he looked at her, he felt that the whole track inside had freed itself from its moorings, twisted back, curled around and slammed him. Her arrival into his life at this particular moment was either a grotesque karmic blunder or the last perfect crank of the kaleidoscope. Zoë was sitting as far away from the stereo speakers as she could get. The Rolling Stones couldn’t have been louder if they’d been there in person. John sat down next to her. She made a gesture, cupping one ear, then shrugged, rolled her eyes: “Don’t bother to say a thing. I can’t possibly hear you.”

He was still admiring her, not merely her clothes, but her ensemble—no other word would do. He was sure she’d be pleased if she knew it; she’d obviously dressed to be admired. He smiled back at her, hoping she’d read his message: “Despite all appearances to the contrary, everything here is cool. More than cool, it’s just dandy.”

Last night, she’d presented herself with a simplicity that was elegance itself—in sandals, jeans, and a crisp white blouse that looked as though it had been freshly ironed. Tonight, however, she’d changed into a look that he suspected was dearer to her heart—a chiffon top, pale russet, and another pair of jeans, tighter and sleeker, with butterflies embroidered on the back pockets. She was cinched at the waist by a broad belt that looked as though it had been slapped together from odds and ends of leather—black, scarlet, and a color the magazines would surely have called mulberry—studded with nailheads in a pattern that suggested that the craftsman who’d made it had been stoned to the eyeballs. Her purse matched her belt. It wasn’t quite September yet, but she was wearing boots—not with extremely high heels by any means but higher than any self-respecting Movement woman would have worn—in a mulberry that matched the patches on her belt and purse, matched her lipstick. John had lost track of the fashion mags lately, and he hadn’t been ready for mulberry lipstick. After years of white or the palest of pinks or nothing at all, it was almost mind-blowing.

Zoë herself was there too, somewhere—or at least he hoped she was—and he flashed on all the times when he and Zoë, in a previous incarnation, had sat at the back of her parents’ living room, side by side, out of the way, watching the action go down and commenting on it under their breath like co-conspirators.

Tonight’s show was well in progress. There were four hip types John didn’t know—three chicks and a cat—taking up one wall. They seemed to be bit players or extras. Lyons’ little girlfriend was lying on her stomach directly between the stereo speakers as though trying to transform herself into an extension of the sound equipment. A zillion colors of crayons were scattered all around her, and she never looked up from her drawing. She might get a line or two of dialogue later, but John doubted it. Cassandra, however, was obviously one of the principals; she’d settled against the opposite wall and looked like a cat holding itself in repose but more than ready should a mouse be so stupid as to amble by. And Lyons and Peter were still where they had been before, sitting close to each other on the couch. Tom had joined them there. He was eating the omelet John had made for him.

Zoë mimed another communication. Her spread palms said, “What are we doing here?” or “I don’t get it.” She aimed her fingers at him, then at herself, and finally—with a small wavy motion—at the door, asking him if he wanted to split.

He nodded, smiled. His shrug meant—or he hoped she would take it to mean—“Yeah, just as soon as there’s a break in the action.”

He’d taped iconic images of her to his walls for years, but he hadn’t seen the real Zoë since she’d been sixteen. Her birthday was sometime in August, so she must have just turned twenty-one. Everybody changes a whole hell of a lot between sixteen and twenty-one, and he certainly hadn’t expected her to be the bubbly ingénue he remembered, but still— Well, OK, he liked this new person, and this new person seemed to like him, but he was a little in awe of her. Had she really transformed herself into the self-contained young lady she appeared to be? And God, she was lovely. He’d seen her in Vogue, in Seventeen, in the Sunday New York Times, so of course he’d expected her to be lovely, but he hadn’t been ready for this—the living girl and not the image.

The Stones wound to an end; the tone arm lifted from the record, clearly signaling the opening of the next act. The silence was impossible. John’s ears were ringing. And Peter’s voice was too loud. “These people, man. I don’t know anything about anything with all these fucking people here. Come on, Bob, you’ve got to be putting me on.”

Lyons said in his silly high-pitched voice, “He thinks I’m putting him on. How do you like them green apples, Tommy? He thinks GIs are so dumb they can’t get their asses over the toilet bowl.”

With his mass of tangled hair, handlebar mustache, and leather vest, Bob Lyons looked more than ever like a warped incarnation of a Hollywood cowboy. John knew Peter slightly—had met him in the Zygote office when he’d fallen by to promote his band. He was the manager and sound man for Trackless Waste. He was sitting stiffly now, hands in his armpits, staring at Lyons, his head tilted forward—tipped, balanced. Peter had large brown eyes, something wistful about them, like a collie’s.

Lyons laughed expansively, grinned around the room, and then, with no warning, slapped Peter across the face, slapped him with the hand holding the gun. Peter jerked back. Blood welled up from his lower lip. His eyes, John saw, were wet with tears.

And Zoë’s eyes—intense blue flash—were checking out the entire set. Now she was looking down at her glossy fingernails. She wore clear polish—coats and coats of it.

“Peter.” Lyons was talking softly, but John could hear every word. “Before this night’s out, you and me are going to be tight. We’re going to love each other like brothers. We’re going to bare our hearts and our souls, man. We’re going to let everything hang out there is to hang. We’re going to get so tight, take a motherfucking crowbar to separate us. But there’s a few changes you got to go through before we get there, you dig? Like one thing you’ve got to be clear on, man . . . I’d just as leave kill you as look at you. You know me, Peter. I was in Nam, right? I’m crazy, right? I was one of them dudes raining down death from the skies, right? I’ve killed more zips than a dog has fleas, right? And I wouldn’t mind killing you.”

“Give the man a break, Robert,” Tom said quietly. “Raining down death from the skies? Jesus, you was in field maintenance the same as I was.”

Lyons laughed, said in the silly cheery voice of a clown, “Susie, my sweet. I hate to interrupt your artwork, but could you please turn the record over?”

Without speaking, the girl rose and turned the record over. Sound smashed through the room. Peter’s lips were moving. Zoë looked at John. He stared back at her. He couldn’t move, couldn’t do a damn thing. The rush of fear had swelled into such immensity that it had reversed itself. The assault on his eardrums, the fearful knots of tension between his shoulder blades, Zoë’s eyes—all had more substance, more immediacy, than anything going on in that Pinter play on the other side of the room. He should do something. But what? Take Zoë by her lily-white hand and lead her out of there? But if he did that, he’d interrupt the action, call attention to Zoë and to himself. And besides, you coudn’t interrupt a performance once it had started.

Lyons slapped Peter’s face again—with the butt of the gun. Zoë winced, her body contracting in the chair, and then John saw Zoë trying to send a message to her sister—an SOS—but Cassandra couldn’t see it. Cassandra was smoking one of Lyons’ imported cigarettes and was reading, apparently with total absorption, the liner notes on one of his records.

Lyons yelled something, gestured. The girlfriend hit the button on the turntable and the tone arm lifted, allowing everyone to hear Peter’s voice cracking badly. “ . . . from me, Bob? Jesus Christ, what do you want? Do you want me to get down on my knees?”

“Well, that’s an idea,” Lyons said. He winked at Tom.

It was quiet. “You’ve got to believe me, man.” Peter’s face was wet. John couldn’t tell if it was sweat or tears.

“Why don’t you make us all some nice hot chocolate?” Lyons said to the girlfriend. “Now wouldn’t that be nice?” He giggled. “Put a hit of almond extract in it.”

Without speaking, the girl got up and walked into the kitchen.

“Bob, for Christ’s sake, what do you want from me?”

“Now, Peter, all I want for us is to resume the love and affection that once made our hearts beat as one.” Lyons turned to Tom. “I don’t think he’s getting the message. I don’t think he realizes that he’s teetering on that fine line.”

“Maybe he needs another joint,” Tom said.

“Now that’s an idea.” Lyons picked a joint from the pile Tom had been rolling, shoved it between Peter’s lips. “Smoke, you cock–sucker,” he said softly. “That’s it, smoke it all up right down to the bitter end.”

No sound in the room but the crackle of burning grass and paper, the sharp hissing of Peter’s breath. Peter’s eyes were blinking, streaming. “Good, good,” Lyons said. “Now eat the roach. Waste not, want not.”

“What are you trying to do to me, Bob?”

Lyons was speaking slowly in his normal voice. It was quite a deep voice. “Shit, man, we just having us a good time. Looking good and having us a good time, right? But you’re not looking as good as you’re going to be looking. Yeah, in a little while here, buddy, you’re going to be sampling your own fine products. Start with four or five caps of that fine orange acid you cooked up. Then we’re going to start hitting you every hour or so with that super-fine crystal you been cranking out. By the time the sun comes up, you’re going to be looking real good, man. But dig it, maybe there’s some way we can avoid that shit. For starters, why don’t you tell me about the deal you did with those nasty men?”

“Bob, I didn’t do any deal.”

“I don’t think he loves me anymore,” Lyons said to Tom and lifted the muzzle of the revolver to Peter’s ear. “My heart’s motherfucking broken. You better move over, man. I don’t want you to get splattered with the blood and bone.” Tom slid off the couch, sat down next to Cassandra.

“John!” Zoë said in a small distinct whisper.

“Wait,” he whispered back to her. Made a pushing gesture. Don’t move. Just sit there.

“Lyons, for God’s sake,” Peter said. “What is it going to take for you to believe me? Do you want me to beg you? Is that what it is?”

“You might give it a try.” He prodded Peter with the barrel of the gun. “That’s it, motherfucker, down on your knees.”

Peter sank to his knees. His entire body was shaking. “Bob, for Christ’s sake.”

“Just shut up for a minute, boy. Open your mouth.”

Peter’s face went slack with surprise. He opened his mouth. “That’s it. Wider. Wider. Just like at the dentist’s.”

Lyons giggled. “That’s it. Good boy. A littler wider yet.” With a single explosive movement, Lyons jammed the gun into Peter’s mouth. “See, Tom,” he said, “now his whole fucking body will act as a silencer. There’ll just be a dull thud.”

“I ain’t so sure of that, Robert,” Tom said. “Not with a .44 Magnum.”

The room filled up with the stench of human feces. Urine dribbled down from the front of Peter’s pants, tears streamed from his eyes. The only sound in the room was the small scraping sound of gagging.

“Everybody sort of get back,” Lyons said, grinning, “so you won’t get splattered.” Once again he drew back the hammer on the gun.

“I don’t know, Bob,” Tom said, “I think you ought to give him another chance.”

“Oh, do you think so?”

“Yeah, I don’t think he got the message before, but I think he’s got it now.”

“Oh, do you? Well shit, can’t hurt to check.” He extracted the gun from Peter’s mouth.

Peter jumped up and ran for the door. Lyons was on his feet, crouching, swiveling, his right hand braced with his left. “Peter,” he yelled.

Peter froze, his hand on the doorknob. “You think I wouldn’t blow you away right here in my own apartment?” Lyons said. “You think I wouldn’t blow you away in front of all these nice folks? Well, listen to me, man. You think I give a shit? I’m motherfucking nuts.”

Peter released the doorknob, turned slowly, sank to his knees in front of the door, and began to cry. “I did it. I did it, I did it, I did it. I set you up. I made the fucking deal. Christ, Bob, don’t kill me. I’ll do anything you say, Bob. I’ll give you the bread back. I spent some of it, but I’ll give you all I’ve got. Please don’t kill me, man. I don’t want to die, man. Jesus, man, please. I don’t want to die.”

Lyons laughed, said to the room at large, “See, I told him we was going to be tight again. I can feel the love returning already.” And then to Peter: “Go on in the bathroom and clean yourself up, man. You’re disgusting.”

Lyons scooted on his bottom down the length of the couch so he could aim his gun directly into the bathroom. “No, man. Just leave the door open so I can see you.” He waved, blew a kiss. His voice had risen again into its absurd treble register. “This is the watch bird, watching you. Don’t forget, man, I can see you!” He giggled.

“Will you please walk me to my car?” Zoë said to John. She gathered up her purse and stood up. John scrambled behind her. She strode purposefully across the room, past Tom and Cassandra, past Lyons. She didn’t look at any of them.

“So pleased to meet you,” Lyons squeaked. “Any sister of a friend of Tom’s is a sister of a friend of mine. Goodnight, Raymond Lee, or whoever the hell you are tonight. Fall by any time, man. Always glad to catch your act. Yeah, John Dupre, there’s always a little smoke here if you should care to fall by.”

• • •

How did he know my name? Crashing, dope-twisted buildings of the city down around his ears—Jesus, John thought, how could Zoë walk that fast in heels? She stopped so abruptly he almost ran her down—saved herself with one hand slammed into his shoulder, then thrust her purse at him. A spattering disoriented instant before he understood what she wanted—he grabbed the purse. She pressed her hands onto the hood of a parked car, bent forward, her body contracting. Her ribcage, under the sheer blouse, heaved. Her hair swung around her face, hiding it. John heard the creaking of her leather belt. Her body was arching like a bow. She was gagging.

“Are you going to be sick?”

She walked away fast. He jogged several steps to catch up. He was still carrying her purse. “How could you all just sit there like that?” she said. “How could you just sit there and watch? How could you do that? Haven’t you got any morals? What the hell is wrong with you?”

“It was . . . like a show, a performance . . . like guerilla theatre.”

“Is that what you guys do for fun?”

If thoughts were things, his would have been breaking glass.

“God, I’m so stoned,” she said. “I’ve never been so stoned in my entire life. The whole city looks ugly to me. Oh, what a grotty city! How could you just sit there like that? That was the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life. It was obscene.”

“That dude sold him out . . . Shit, Lyons got what he wanted. That was the end of the . . .”

“What is Cassandra doing?”

That was a question he certainly couldn’t answer.

“I can’t understand her. I just can’t. She has more brains than . . . I just can’t understand why she’s living like this. I can’t understand why any of you . . . You’re all supposed to be smarter than me. Why don’t you act smarter?”

There was her little blue Mini. She held out her hand for her purse. They got into the car. “Can I stay with you?” she said.

“Of course you can.”

“Thanks. I’ll be damned if I’ll spend another night in that crappy crash pad.” She pulled out like a teenage hot-rodder, burning rubber—melded into the crazy Boston traffic so quickly it stopped his breath. “Hey, Zo,” he said, “are you driving too fast, or am I so stoned I can’t tell?”

“I am driving too fast, but I don’t care.”

She pulled up in front of Pam’s apartment. “Good memory,” he said.

“It’s not hard. It’s just off Harvard Square.” She didn’t make any move to get out of the car.

He’d never thought that Zoë was the least bit like Cassandra. He’d seen Zoë angry before—had seen her stomp off in fine teenage snits, slamming doors behind her—but he’d never suspected that she was just as capable of fury as her sister. Her words were coming out now in short fiery bursts like the terse communications of a blast furnace.

“What are you guys doing? Why do you know somebody who even owns a gun? What is Cassandra doing? If it’s so goddamn great to get a college degree, why didn’t she do it? Why didn’t she finish at Bennington? She could have done anything. A Playboy bunny, oh, my God, it’s just . . . Dad was just . . . She broke his heart. Oh, I’m so unhappy. What on earth am I going to tell him? ‘Oh, don’t worry about her, Dad, she’s living with a dope dealer. He’s a perfectly nice guy.’ Why is somebody calling me up, pretending he’s from the Los Angeles Police Department? Was that some friend of hers playing a joke? Why was he calling me? I said, ‘Come on, you jerk, you’re not a cop,’ and he hung up on me. What the hell was that all about? What the hell is she doing?”

• • •

ZOË HAD dutifully removed her boots at the door; now she was striding back and forth in Pam’s apartment—all the way to the far wall, turn, SWISH, and then back. Maybe that’s the way she walked on a runway—with that long rangy lope. Did she do runway modeling? It certainly wasn’t the time to ask her.

“They’re probably yucking it up right at this very minute,” John was telling her. “‘Oh, my God, Lyons,’ Peter is saying, ‘you scared the shit out of me, man. I really thought you were going to do it.’ And Lyons is giggling. ‘Yeah, man, I got you good.’ And Lyons did get him good. He got what he wanted. The coin. That’s what counts.”

He couldn’t tell if she was buying it or not. He certainly wouldn’t have bought it. Maybe he could do better with the phone call. “A boyfriend,” he said, laying it out just as fast as he could make it up. Yeah, one of these insecure possessive jealous types. Cassandra had broken his heart. He’d wanted to marry her. He was some kind of a weirdo—harmless, though. He’d been calling everybody she’d ever mentioned—friends, family, he didn’t care. He’d even called John. “Yeah, he said he’d gone to school with Cassandra . . . if you could believe that. Like I wouldn’t know everybody Cassandra had gone to school with?” Hey, he thought, that’s not too bad. That one’s totally plausible.

Zoë stopped pacing, fell into a chair. She was much taller than he remembered. “I should never smoke marijuana,” she said. “Never, never, never. It gives me the weirdest thoughts and . . . Do you have anything sweet? . . . Oh, forget I said that. I didn’t really say that . . . Do you think she’d come back to New York with me?”

Not on a bet, he thought, but he said, “I don’t know. It’s worth a try.”

“I could get her work. She’d have to lose a few pounds, but that wouldn’t be hard for her. Oh, I’m so worried about her.”

He washed and cut up a peach, put it in a bowl, added several spoonfuls of yogurt and a fine drizzle of maple syrup. “Oh my God, a million calories,” she said, but she took it.

Cranked and vibrating, still shorting out on the dope, he knew perfectly well that a dark immensity was sniffing at him, but he didn’t want to deal with it yet. Later, he would deal with it—yeah, he’d deal with all of it. With Pamela and The Critique—Pamela who was almost certainly sleeping with Deb again. With the possibility of agents, whoever they were, poised and ready, one jump behind his ass. With the tapped phones, if they really were tapped, with his trashed apartment, and, yeah, it really had been trashed, and with every other wretched twist and turn of the real. With the image of that poor kid on his knees with a gun shoved down his throat. With the nasty puzzle of Bob Lyons, because if Lyons knew John’s real name—well then, by Jesus, it was long past time to split, and, yeah, he would deal with it all later, damn it, because right now a girl from his hometown was sitting in a basket chair in his apartment, a girl he might even be able to say was a friend of his, so whatever was sniffing around out there could just go fuck itself. He would tune it out, shut it out. Zoë, he thought, please, for an hour at least, be the whole world for me.

• • •

“IF ALL I had to do was work in front of a camera, I’d think I’d died and gone to heaven.” She was telling him because he’d asked her. “But there’s all this other stuff in the industry . . . the money stuff, and . . . Oh, and everybody comes on to you constantly. That’s the biggest pain. You can’t just . . . ‘Hey, baby, don’t be so uptight.’ Oh, God. You’re surrounded by sleazeballs. You’re just drowning in sleazeballs. Your agency’s supposed to protect you from sleazeballs, but of course they never do. And even just . . . You have to be dressed up to go to look-sees. Oh, I’m so sick of ‘Hey, blondie.’ I never want to hear ‘Hey, blondie’ again in my life.”

“I bet. But it looks good on you. I really dig you blond.”

“Oh, do you? Thanks. I just went a shade lighter.”

“Yeah, I remember. You were talking about it the last time I saw you. The summer just before I left.”

“Really? That long ago? Yeah, I guess I was. The minute I went blond, I got a lot more work. You know what? I’m still doing teenage stuff . . . although not so much any more. It’s getting harder. I’m competing with real teenagers, and some of those girls are . . . Whew. I can’t get any thinner. I just can’t do Twiggy. If I tried to get any thinner, I’d just make myself sick, and . . . Oh, I can’t stop thinking about that poor boy. If I close my eyes, I can still see him. God, that was sickening. That was just horrible. Are you sure he’s all right?”

“Yeah, he’s all right. Believe me, Zo, it was just a big show, a performance . . . Yeah, that Lyons is a fucking asshole.”

“What a horrible man. I wish I could believe you. Oh, my God, it sure looked real to me.”

Her eyes clouded over. She turned away, stared at the wall. “So, I don’t know . . . Yeah, it’s . . . I was about to say, ‘It’s a job,’ but that’s just me being . . . It’s more than a job. Of course it is. I’m really glad I did it. The industry’s been good to me, but . . . Oh, but they want you brainless.” She drew a circle in front of her forehead. “Nothing. That’s what everybody expects. I’ve learned to keep my little mouth shut.

“And then there’s all these irritating dumb stupid little things. Like I really had no business driving up here this weekend. It was crazy. If I hadn’t been so worried . . . I have a shoot on Monday at the crack of dawn. Why do they do that? If I break a nail before then, I’m one dead pussycat. It’s a crazy way to live, but that’s what I’m paid for, and . . . You know, sometimes I make tons of money. Like just tons of it. But it’s never dependable. Weeks go by when I don’t make a cent . . . How about you? What are you doing?”

“I keep trying to figure that one out.”

“Cassandra said you really miss your girlfriend.”

“Oh, yeah, I do.”

“What’s she like?”

What? he thought. In twenty words or less? He picked up the picture of Pamela from his desk and handed it to her. “She still sort of looks like this . . . if you can just imagine her, you know, grown up.”

“Oh, wow, she’s a real doll. Cassandra said she was a dancer.”

“Yeah, years ago.”

“Cassandra said you were androgynous together.”

“Oh, she did, did she?”

“Yeah. She gave me your article. She said it was far out, like it blew her mind. I started it, but . . . I couldn’t really concentrate. I’ll read it carefully when I get home.”

“You don’t have to read it.” That didn’t sound right. He didn’t want to come off as just another asshole who expected her to have zero between her ears—but he was embarrassed, prickly with it. “Like you can read it if you want. It’s not a big deal.”

“Oh, I want to read everything you write . . . Androgyny’s big this season.”

He wasn’t sure he’d heard her right. “What? You’re putting me on.”

“Oh, no. It’s really big. Especially in teenwear. I’ve even done a shoot . . . like they put me in these big yellow lace-up hunting boots . . . boys’ size 6. And a huge watch with a thick strap, and baggy jeans and a boy’s shirt, and I did all these tomboy poses. Not at all what I usually do, but it was fun.”

“Wait a minute. Like they actually called it androgyny? Like they used the word? Like they really knew what they were doing?”

“Oh, yeah. I’ve heard it called androgyny . . . although usually what you hear is unisex,” and in a bright now-I-am-quoting voice, “‘This season boys will be dressing like girls who dress like boys, and girls will be dressing like boys who dress like girls . . . ’ That was in some magazine . . . Ingenue maybe. I know what they’re getting at, but they didn’t quite get it right. I wouldn’t want to be a girl who dressed like a boy dressed like a girl. Most of the boys I know who dress like girls wear five-inch heels and rhinestones.”

He was having trouble getting his mind wrapped around this one. Well, if the purpose of theory is to present a correct analysis of the present historical moment, maybe he and Pam had genuinely been in touch with the Zeitgeist. “Come on, Zo,” he said. “You’re telling me that this is actually a movement in fashion right now?”

“Oh, yeah. I go to all these receptions and openings and like . . . It’s part of my job. I have to show up . . . be seen, you know. And it’s fun too. You get to see what everybody’s wearing, and . . . You should see some of the boys. From across the room you’d think they were girls. I saw a boy in lace harem pants. That was kind of like the . . . But you can go too far with it. I saw a spread somewhere. I think it was in a British magazine. Little boys in kilts dressed like their big sisters. I mean exactly, even the patent leather shoes. It was cute, I suppose, but I thought it was . . . un petit fey. Those poor little boys probably wanted to shoot themselves.”

How could he have been so out of it that he hadn’t noticed something going down in fashion? He and Pam must have been living in a sealed bubble. But androgyny? Somewhere out there on the cutting edge of fashion, maybe, but aimed at the mainstream? Jesus, that was fast. The Spectacle worked just the way Pam had always said it did. The bastards would pick up anything and sell it back. Nothing was private. Nothing was allowed to exist outside the Spectacle; it absorbed everything into itself. As Snyder said, it created “hungry ghosts”—people with gargantuan appetites and throats the size of needles. The images of Zoë he’d taped to his walls for years—as lovely as they’d been—were empty reflections glittering back from the Spectacle. He’d allowed the human relationship he’d once had with her to be mediated by those images, but he’d be damned if he’d allow those images to get in the way any longer. New York model? Hell, she was a nice girl from Raysburg. She had a West Virginia accent the same as he did—exactly the same, stamped by the upper Ohio valley. He’d kissed her under the mistletoe, taken her picture, listened to her chatter about her hopes and dreams and boyfriends and clothes. Sometimes he’d even told her what was in his heart.

• • •

IT WAS after four, and they were still talking. He wasn’t even close to stopping, and she didn’t seem to be either. The amorphous horror sniffing around the apartment was still out there—a repulsive hum in the background—and he was sure that Zoë could sense it as well as he could, but, just as he’d done, she seemed to have bracketed it off. She hadn’t mentioned the really big show at Lyons’ place for hours.

“Oh wow,” she was saying, “hemlines. Everybody knows you’ve got to cover your knees, the question is, how far?”

It wasn’t the grass now—that had worn off a long time ago, and she hadn’t wanted to smoke any more—it was his own warped head, but he was following out a side strand through the millions of twists and complications. It had started with remembering what Cassandra had always said about her little sister, “There’s not an ounce of X in her”—that indefinable quality that marked both him and Cassandra, set them apart, made them different. Cassandra had meant it as a put-down, but now he saw it as a singleness, a wholeness—not a bad thing at all. Zoë was not double, or multiple, as he and Cassandra were—as Pam was. And then there was something else.

“The best place for me is just below the knee. But when I go midcalf, it changes the line and I’ve got to wear heels. Some of the fall shoes are really high again . . .”

If he was girl-identified as Pam said he was, then Zoë was the girl he was identified with. She was a grown-up incarnation of those little girls who’d been his playmates when he’d been a child—Cindy and Nancy. When he was with Zoë, he felt exactly the way he’d felt playing dolls and dressup with the girls at seven—that he was, for once and wonderfully, the right person in the right place. There had to be some wholeness in that—some way out.

“I’m not sorry to see the end of the mini, but all the stuff I love, like anything constructed, anything tailored . . . it’s just out right now. Everything’s flowy and soft.”

“Everything goes in cycles,” he said. “Tailored and constructed will come back. Those classic looks always come back . . . Hey, thanks for sending me that issue of Vogue. And the tear-sheets and your head shot. I really appreciated that. I should have called you or something. I’m sorry.”

“Oh. Did you like them? I thought you might be interested in my career.”

“I am. I’ll always be interested in your career. I loved seeing you in Vogue . . . Do you realize we haven’t talked to each other in five years?”

The personal is the way out, he thought. Just as Pam had always said—the subjective. All the things he and Zoë had shared. “Remember your go-go boots?” he said—and the vinyl skirt she’d made, knocking it off from the cover of Seventeen, and the photo shoots, and the nights they’d sat on the glider on her parents’ front porch.

“I thought Cassandra was really mean to you,” she said, “and you were . . .”

“Yeah, really fat.”

“I wasn’t going to say that. I knew you’d be all right once you sorted yourself out. But you went around like . . . I don’t know. With your sad thoughts and your German poetry.”

Amazing. “Did I talk about German poetry?”

“Yeah, you did. With Cassandra. Not with me. You thought I was a pinhead.”

“No, I didn’t. I just didn’t think you’d want to hear a big lecture about it . . . Yeah, Rilke, my God. After all these years, I still remember a lot of . . . Nothing useful, you know? Like I couldn’t go to Germany and say, ‘Where’s the can?’ or ‘Please pass the schnitzel,’ but I could say, ‘Whoever’s alone now is going to stay alone . . . for a long time to come.’” What a great example to come up with, he thought. Yeah, that was one hell of a fine example.

“So how do you say it?”

“What? You want it in German? . . . Wer jetzt allein ist wird es lange bleiben.”

“Wow. You really do remember.”

“Of course I remember. I even remember the one I always associated with you.” Woops, he thought. Mistake.

“With me? What one?” She looked as excited as a little kid.

“No, I’m not really sure . . .”

“Yes, you are. I know you are. Come on. Tell me.”

“Du im Voraus vorlorne Geliebte, Nimmergekommene . . .”

“Come on, John. Don’t tease me. What’s it mean?”

It was a poem he knew so well he never bothered to translate it into English in his mind. He couldn’t see any reason why he shouldn’t tell her what it meant. It was a perfect poem—written in words that didn’t lie. “You’re lost already . . .” he began, saw the next inevitable word as “beloved,” knew he shouldn’t say that one, censored it. But the rest of it was going to be all right.

Looking away from her, concentrating, he spooled through the German, turning it into his own personal English: “You’re lost already. You’re never going to get here. I don’t even know what songs you like. I don’t look for you anymore, don’t think I’m going to find you somewhere in the future. All the huge images in me . . . distant landscapes, cities and towers and bridges and all those weird twists in the road . . . and that place where the gods are still living . . . It all rises up to mean I’m never going to find you. Ah, you were the garden. I saw you with such hope . . .”

More than surprised—he was struck, stopped. He was choked with tears. How embarrassing. He hoped she hadn’t noticed. He turned to look at her. He couldn’t read anything from her expression, but, oh, Lord, she had beautiful eyes.

“Oh, I should read more,” she said. “It’s just that I’m so damned busy.”

She stood up, walked into the kitchen. “I’ve never been much of a reader, I’m afraid. Could you put on some water for tea?”

“Sure.”

“Did you really see me with hope?”

“Yeah, I did.”

“I’m glad. I wanted to give you hope, and . . . You gave me hope too. You were the only one who believed in me.”

He felt as though they were balanced on something fragile, something infinitely delicate. “I can tell you what songs I like,” she said.

“OK, tell me.”

“I like ‘Angel of the Morning.’ I adore it. And I like ‘Sunshine Superman’ and ‘Crimson and Clover.’ And I like one by the Mamas and the Papas. Can you guess which one?”

He knew immediately. “‘Coming to the Canyon.’”

“Right,” she said, laughing. “I was one of those young girls coming to the canyon. I thought of that whenever I was schlepping my book around town.”

“And I’ll bet you like Melanie.”

“See, you know what songs I like after all. I adore Melanie. ‘Candles in the Rain.’”

The doorbell rang, and it took him a moment to identify it—that bell note, that spaceship bong. He checked his watch. It was just after six. “Yeah?” he said into the speaker.

“Hey, hero.”

“It’s your sister,” he said to Zoë.

“Oh, piss.”

He ran down the stairs, jerked the door open. “Jesus, Cass, your timing is . . .”

“Fuck that shit, man, this is the only time I’ve got.” Instead of coming in, Cassandra grabbed him, hauled him through the door and out onto the front steps. The door swung shut, and the lock clicked. He felt an icy blast coming off her.

He took both of her hands. They were wet and cold. He could feel her shaking. “He blew him away,” she said.

“What? Lyons?”

“Yeah, Lyons. Yeah, sure, motherfucking Lyons. He blew that kid away.”

“Jesus, Cass, don’t fuck with my head.”

“Fuck with your head? Oh, Jesus. It’s true, man. He really did it. I’m fucking scared, man. I’m just scared all the time now. It’s like this knot in my chest that won’t go away.”

They both glanced toward the closed door. They had instantly become co-conspirators. They were working against time. “She’s my sister and I want her out of here. I mean like now. Like out of Boston. I want her motherfucking gone.”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Shit,” she said, “we got into Lyons’ car, that fucking Lincoln . . . Tommy and me and that dippy little chick in the back. The kid up front with Lyons. And you know that shit he’d been saying? ‘I should take you down to Roxbury and blow you away in an alley so the pigs will think the niggers did it.’ Well, that’s exactly what he did. He pulled up at the end of this motherfucking alley, tight, with the car in tight, so Peter would just have one way to go. Like it was down the alley or nowhere, and he said, ‘OK, motherfucker, make your break.’

“I didn’t think he was going to do it. Tommy didn’t either. I mean, honest to God, neither one of us thought he was going to do it. And the kid just sat there. Lyons reached across him, and opened the door, and he said it again, ‘Make your break, motherfucker,’ and Peter just sat there like he was frozen. He was crying, man. It was fucking pathetic. Lyons says, ‘Hey, man, you know what’s on the other side of death? Nothing. Nothing at all. It’s the big fat zip.’ And Peter’s just crying. Lyons says, ‘Come on, asshole, I want to see you stepping right along. You got a fighting chance here. Fair’s fair, right? I’ll give you to the count of ten, and then I’m going to snuff you.’ He starts counting. He gets to . . . I don’t know, two or three, and all of a sudden Peter jumps up like a rabbit takes off down that alley just running like a son of a bitch.

“And Lyons blew him away. Four shots. I counted them. I think he hit him with all four, but I don’t know for sure. Shit, he didn’t even give the poor bastard his count of ten.”