Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (9 page)

8

Jason Taverner did not, at the moment, wish to return to Kathy. Nor, he decided, did he want to try Heather Hart once again. He tapped his coat pocket; he still had his money, and, because of the police pass, he could feel free to travel anywhere. A pol-pass was a passport to the entire planet; until they APB-ed on him he could travel as far as he wanted, including unimproved areas such as specific, acceptable jungle-infested islands in the South Pacific. There they might not find him for months, not with what his money would buy in an open-area spot such as that.

I’ve got three things going for me, he realized. I’ve got money, good looks, and personality. Four things: I also have forty-two years of experience as a six.

An apartment.

But, he thought, if I rent an apartment, the rotive manager will be required by law to take my fingerprints; they’ll be routinely mailed to Pol-Dat Central…and when the police have discovered that my ID cards are fakes, they’ll find they have a direct line to me. So there goes that.

What I need, he said to himself,
is to find someone who already has an apartment. In their name, with their prints
.

And that means another girl.

Where do I find such a one? he asked himself, and had the answer already on his tongue: at a first-rate cocktail lounge. The kind many women go to, with a three-man combo playing fob jazzy, preferably blacks. Well dressed.

Am I well enough dressed, though? he wondered, and took a good look at his silk suit under the steady white-and-red light of a huge AAMCO sign. Not his best but nearly so…but wrinkled. Well, in the gloom of a cocktail lounge it wouldn’t show.

He hailed a cab, and presently found himself quibbling toward the more acceptable part of the city to which he was accustomed—accustomed, at least, during the most recent years of his life, his career When he had reached the very top.

A club, he thought, where I’ve appeared. A club I really know. Know the maître d’, the hatcheck girl, the flower girl…unless they, like me, are somehow now changed.

But as yet it appeared that nothing but himself had changed.
His
circumstances. Not theirs.

The Blue Fox Room of the Hayette Hotel in Reno. He had played there a number of times; he knew the layout and the staff backward and forward.

To the cab he said, “Reno.”

Beautifully, the cab peeled off in a great swooping righthand motion; he felt himself going with it, and enjoyed it. The cab picked up speed: they had entered a virtually unused air corridor, and the upper velocity limit was perhaps as high as twelve hundred m.p.h.

“I’d like to use the phone,” Jason said.

The left wall of the cab opened and a picphone slid out, cord twisted in a baroque loop.

He knew the number of the Blue Fox Room by heart; he dialed it, waited, heard a click and then a mature male voice saying, “Blue Fox Room, where Freddy Hydrocephalic is appearing in two shows nightly, at eight and at twelve; only thirty dollars’ cover charge and girls provided while you watch. May I help you?”

“Is this good old Jumpy Mike?” Jason said. “Good old Jumpy Mike himself?”

“Yes, this certainly is.” The formality of the voice ebbed. “Who am I speaking to, may I ask?” A warm chuckle.

Taking a deep breath, Jason said, “This is Jason Taverner.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Taverner.” Jumpy Mike sounded puzzled. “Right now at the moment I can’t quite—”

“It’s been a long time,” Jason interrupted. “Can you give me a table toward the front of the room—”

“The Blue Fox Room is completely sold out, Mr. Taverner,” Jumpy Mike rumbled in his fat way. “I’m very sorry.”

“No table at all?” Jason said. “At any price?”

“Sorry, Mr. Taverner, none.” The voice faded in the direction of remoteness. “Try us in two weeks.” Good old Jumpy Mike hung up.

Silence.

Jesus shit Christ, Jason said to himself. “God,” he said aloud. “God damn it.” His teeth ground against one another, sending sheets of pain through his trigeminal nerve.

“New instructions, big fellow?” the cab asked tonelessly.

“Make it Las Vegas,” Jason grated. I’ll try the Nellie Melba Room of the Drake’s Arms, he decided. Not too long ago he had had good luck there, at a time when Heather Hart had been fulfilling an engagement in Sweden. A reasonable number of reasonably high class chicks hung out there, gambling, drinking, listening to the entertainment, getting it on. It was worth a try, if the Blue Fox Room—and the others like it—were closed to him. After all, what could he lose?

Half an hour later the cab deposited him on the roof field of the Drake’s Arms. Shivering in the chill night air, Jason made his way to the royal descent carpet; a moment later he had stepped from it into the warmth-color-light-movement of the Nellie Melba Room.

The time: seven-thirty. The first show would begin soon. He glanced at the notice; Freddy Hydrocephalic was appearing here, too, but doing a lesser tape at lower prices. Maybe he’ll remember me, Jason thought. Probably not. And then, as he thought more deeply on it, he thought, No chance at all.

If Heather Hart didn’t remember him no one would.

He seated himself at the crowded bar—on the only stool left—and, when the bartender at last noticed him, ordered scotch and honey, mulled. A pat of butter floated in it.

“That’ll be three dollars,” the bartender said.

“Put it on my—” Jason began and then gave up. He brought out a five.

And then he noticed her.

Seated several seats down. She had been his mistress years ago; he had not seen her in a hell of a while. But she still has a good figure, he observed, even though she’s gotten a lot older. Ruth Rae. Of all people.

One thing about Ruth Rae: she was smart enough not to let her skin become too tanned. Nothing aged a woman’s skin faster than tanning, and few somen seemed to know it. For a woman Ruth’s age—he guessed she was now thirty-eight or -nine—tanning would have turned her skin into wrinkled leather.

And, too, she dressed well. She showed off her excellent figure. If only time had avoided its constant series of appointments with her face…anyhow, Ruth still had beautiful black hair, all coiled in an upsweep at the back of her head. Featherplastic eyelashes, brilliant purple streaks across her cheek, as if she had been seared by psychedelic tiger claws.

Dressed in a colorful sari, barefoot—as usual she had kicked off her high-heeled shoes somewhere—and not wearing her glasses, she did not strike him as bad-looking. Ruth Rae, he mused. Sews her own clothes. Bifocals which she never wears when anyone’s around…excluding me. Does she still read the Book-of-the-Month selection? Does she still get off reading those endless dull novels about sexual misdeeds in weird, small, but apparently normal Midwestern towns?

That was one factor about Ruth Rae: her obsession with sex. One year that he recalled she had laid sixty men, not including him: he had entered and left earlier, when the stats were not so high.

And she had always liked his music. Ruth Rae liked sexy vocalists, pop ballads and sweet—sickeningly sweet—strings. In her New York apartment at one time she had set up a huge quad system and more or less lived inside it, eating dietetic sandwiches and drinking fake frosty slime drinks made out of nothing. Listening forty-eight hours at a stretch to disc after disc by the Purple People Strings, which he abominated.

Because her general taste appalled him, it annoyed him that he himself constituted one of her favorites. It was an anomaly which he had never been able to take apart.

What else did he remember about her? Tablespoons of oily yellow fluid every morning: vitamin E. Strangely enough it did not seem to be a shuck in her case; her erotic stamina increased with each spoonful. Lust virtually leaked out of her.

And as he recalled she hated animals. This made him think about Kathy and her cat Domenico. Ruth and Kathy would never groove, he said to himself. But that doesn’t matter; they’ll never meet.

Sliding from his stool he carried his drink down the bar until he stood before Ruth Rae. He did not expect her to know him, but, at one time, she had found him unable to avoid…why wouldn’t that be true now? No one was a better judge of sexual opportunity than Ruth.

“Hi,” he said.

Foggily—because she did not have on her glasses—Ruth Rae lifted her head, scrutinized him. “Hi,” she rasped in her bourbon-bounded voice. “Who are you?”

Jason said, “We met a few years ago in New York. I was doing a walk-on in an episode of
The Phantom Baller
…as I recall it, you had charge of costumes.”

“The episode,” Ruth Rae rasped, “where the Phantom Baller was set upon by pirate queers from another time-period.” She laughed, smiled up at him. “What’s your name?” she inquired, jiggling her wire-supported exposed boobs.

“Jason Taverner,” he said.

“Do you remember my name?”

“Oh yes,” he said. “Ruth Rae.”

“It’s Ruth Gomen now,” she rasped. “Sit down.” She glanced around her, saw no vacant stools. “Table over there.” She stepped supercarefully from her stool and careened in the direction of a vacant table; he took her arm, guided her along. Presently, after a moment of difficult navigation, he had her seated, with himself close beside her.

“You look every bit as beautiful—” he began, but she cut him off brusquely.

“I’m old,” she rasped. “I’m thirty-nine.”

“That’s not old,” Jason said. “I’m forty-two.”

“It’s all right for a man. Not for a woman.” Blearily she stared into her half-raised martini. “Do you know what Bob does? Bob Gomen? He raises dogs. Big, loud, pushy dogs with long hair. It gets into the refrigerator.” She sipped moodily at her martini; then, all at once, her face glowed with animation; she turned toward him and said, “You don’t look forty-two. You look all
right
! Do you know what I think? You ought to be in TV or the movies.”

Jason said cautiously, “I have been in TV. A little.”

“Oh, like the
Phantom Baller Show
.” She nodded. “Well, let’s face it; neither of us made it.”

“I’ll drink to that,” he said, ironically amused; he sipped at his mulled scotch and honey. The pat of butter had melted.

“I believe I do remember you,” Ruth Rae said. “Didn’t you have some blueprints for a house out on the Pacific, a thousand miles away from Australia? Was that you?”

“That was me,” he said, lying.

“And you drove a Rolls-Royce flyship.”

“Yes,” he said. That part was true.

Ruth Rae said, smiling, “Do you know what I’m doing here? Do you have any idea? I’m trying to get to see, to meet, Freddy Hydrocephalic. I’m in love with him.” She laughed the throaty laugh he remembered from the old days. “I keep sending him notes reading ‘I love you,’ and he writes
typed
notes back saying ‘I don’t want to get involved; I have personal problems.’” She laughed again, and finished her drink.

“Another?” Jason said, rising.

“No.” Ruth Rae shook her head. “I don’t drink anymore. There was a period”—she paused, her face troubled—“I wonder if anything like that has ever happened to you. I wouldn’t think so, to look at you.”

“What happened?”

Ruth Rae said, fooling with her empty glass, “I drank
all
the time. Starting at nine o’clock in the morning. And you know what it did for me? It made me look older. I looked fifty. Goddamn booze. Whatever you fear will happen to you, booze will make it happen. In my opinion booze is the great enemy of life. Do you agree?”

“I’m not sure,” Jason said. “I think life has worse enemies than booze.”

“I guess so. Like the forced-labor camps. Do you know they tried to send me to one last year? I really had a terrible time; I had no money—I hadn’t met Bob Gomen yet—and I worked for a savings-and-loan company. One day a deposit
in cash
came in…fifty-dollar-bill stuff, three or four of them.” She introspected for a time. “Anyhow, I took them and put the deposit slip and envelope into the shredder. But they caught me. Entrapment—a setup.”

“Oh,” he said.

“But—see, I had a thing going with my boss. The pols wanted to drag me off to a forced-labor camp—one in Georgia—where I’d be gangbanged to death by rednecks, but he protected me. I still don’t know how he did it, but they let me go. I owe that man a lot, and I never see him anymore. You never see the ones who really love you and help you; you’re always involved with strangers.”

“Do you consider me a stranger?” Jason asked. He thought to himself, I remember one more thing about you, Ruth Rae. She always maintained an impressively expensive apartment. No matter who she happened to be married to: she always lived well.

Ruth Rae eyed him questioningly. “No. I consider you a friend.”

“Thanks.” Reaching, he took hold of her dry hand and held it a second, letting go at exactly the right time.

9

Ruth Rae’s apartment appalled Jason Taverner with its luxury. It must cost her, he reasoned, at least four hundred dollars a day. Bob Gomen must be in good financial shape, he decided. Or anyhow was.

“You didn’t have to buy that fifth of Vat 69,” Ruth said as she took his coat, carrying it and her own to a self-opening closet. “I have Cutty Sark and Hiram Walker’s bourbon—”

She had learned a great deal since he had last slept with her: it was true. Emptied, he lay naked on the blankets of the waterbed, rubbing a broken-out spot at the rim of his nose. Ruth Rae, or rather Mrs. Ruth Gomen now, sat on the carpeted floor, smoking a Pall Mall. Neither of them had spoken for some time; the room had become quiet. And, he thought, as drained as I am. Isn’t there some principle of thermo-dynamics, he thought, that says heat can’t be destroyed, it can only be transferred? But there’s also entropy.

I feel the weight of entropy on me now, he decided. I have discharged myself into a vacuum, and I will never get back what I have given out. I goes only one way. Yes, he thought, I’m sure that is one of the fundamental laws of thermo-dynamics.

“Do you have an encyclopedia machine?” he asked the woman.

“Hell, no.” Worry appeared on her prune-like face. Prune-like—he withdrew the image; it did not seem fair. Her weathered face, he decided. That was more like it.

“What are you thinking?” he asked her.

“No, you tell me what you’re thinking,” Ruth said. “What’s on that big alpha-consciousness-type supersecret brain of yours?”

“Do you remember a girl named Monica Buff?” Jason asked.

“‘Remember’ her! Monica Buff was my sister-in-law for six years. In all that time she never washed her hair once. Tangled, messy, dark-brown ooze of dog fur hanging around her pasty face and dirty short neck.”

“I didn’t realize you disliked her.”

“Jason, she used to
steal
. If you left your purse around she’d rip you off; not just the paper scrip but all the coins as well. She had the brain of a magpie and the voice of a crow, when she talked, which thank God wasn’t often. Do you know that that chick used to go six or seven—sometimes, one time in particular—eight days without saying a word? Just huddled up in a corner like a fractured spider strumming on that five-dollar guitar she owned and never learned the chords for. Okay, she did look pretty in an unkempt messy sort of way. I’ll concede that. If you like gross tail.”

“How’d she stay alive?” Jason asked. He had known Monica Buff only briefly, and by way of Ruth. But during that time he and she had had a short, mind-blowing affair.

“Shoplifting,” Ruth Rae said. “She had that big wicker bag she got in Baja California…she used to stuff stuff into that and then go cruising out of the store big as life.”

“Why didn’t she get caught?”

“She did. They fined her and her brother came up with the bread, so there she was again, out on the street, strolling along barefoot—I mean it!—down Shrewsbury Avenue in Boston, tweaking all the peaches in the grocery-store produce sections. She used to spend ten hours a day in what she called shopping.” Glaring at him, Ruth said, “You know what she did that she never got caught at?” Ruth lowered her voice. “She used to feed escaped students.”

“And they never busted her for that?” Feeding or sheltering an escaped student meant two years in an FLC—the first time. The second time the sentence was five years.

“No, they never busted her. If she thought a pol team was about to run a spot check she’d quickly phone Pol Central and say a man was trying to break into her house. And then she’d maneuver the student outside and then lock him out, and the pols would come and there he’d be, beating on the door exactly as she said. So they’d cart him off and leave her free.” Ruth chuckled, “I heard her make one of those phone calls to Pol Central once. The way she told it, the man—”

Jason said, “Monica was my old lady for three weeks. Five years ago, roughly.”

“Did you ever see her wash her hair during that time?”

“No,” he admitted.

“And she didn’t wear underpants,” Ruth said. “Why would a good-looking man like you want to have an affair with a dirty, stringy, mangy freak like Monica Buff? You couldn’t have been able to take her anywhere; she smelled. She never bathed.”

“Hebephrenia,” Jason said.

“Yes.” Ruth nodded. “That was the diagnosis. I don’t know if you know this but finally she just wandered off, during one of her shopping trips, and never came back; we never saw her again. By now she’s probably dead. Still clutching that wicker shopping bag she got in Baja. That was the big moment in her life, that trip to Mexico. She
bathed
for the occasion, and I fixed up her hair—after I washed it half a dozen times. What did you ever see in her? How could you stand her?”

Jason said, “I liked her sense of humor.”

It’s unfair, he thought, comparing Ruth with a nineteen-year-old girl. Or even with Monica Buff. But—the comparison remained there, in his mind. Making it impossible for him to feel attraction toward Ruth Rae. As good—as experienced, anyhow—as she was in bed.

I am using her, he thought. As Kathy used me. As McNulty used Kathy.

McNulty. Isn’t there a microtrans on me somewhere?

Rapidly, Jason Taverner grabbed up his clothing, swiftly carried it to the bathroom. There, seated on the edge of the tub, he began to inspect each article.

It took him half an hour. But he did, at last, locate it. Small as it was. He flushed it down the toilet; shaken, he made his way back into the bedroom. So they know where I am after all, he realized. I can’t stay here after all.

And I’ve jeopardized Ruth Rae’s life for nothing.

“Wait,” he said aloud.

“Yes?” Ruth said, leaning wearily against the wall of the bathroom, arms folded under her breasts.

“Microtransmitters,” Jason said slowly, “only give approximate locations. Unless something actually tracks back to them locked on their signal.” Until then—

He could not be sure. After all, McNulty had been waiting in Kathy’s apartment. But had McNulty come there in response to the microtransmitter, or because he knew that Kathy lived there? Befuddled by too much anxiety, sex, and scotch, he could not remember; he sat on the tub edge rubbing his forehead, straining to think, to recall exactly what had been said when he and Kathy entered her room to find McNulty waiting for them.

Ed
, he thought. They said that Ed planted the microtrans on me. So it did locate me. But—

Still, maybe it only told them the general area. And they assumed, correctly, that it would be Kathy’s pad.

To Ruth Rae he said, his voice breaking, “God damn it, I hope I haven’t got the pols oinking their asses after you; that would be too much, too goddamn much.” He shook his head, trying to clear it. “Do you have any coffee that’s super-hot?”

“I’ll go punch the stove-console.” Ruth Rae skittered barefoot, wearing only a box bangle, from the bathroom into the kitchen. A moment later she returned with a big plastic mug of coffee, marked
KEEP ON TRUCKIN
’. He accepted it, drank down the steaming coffee.

“I can’t stay,” he said, “any longer. And anyhow, you’re too old.”

She stared at him, ludicrously, like a warped, stomped doll. And then she ran off into the kitchen. Why did I say that? he asked himself. The pressure; my fears. He started after her.

In the kitchen doorway Ruth appeared, holding up a stoneware platter marked
SOUVENIR OF KNOTTS BERRY FARM
. She ran blindly at him and brought it down on his head, her mouth twisting like newborn things just now alive. At that last instant he managed to lift his left elbow and take the blow there; the stoneware platter broke into three jagged pieces, and, down his elbow, blood spurted. He gazed at the blood, the shattered pieces of platter on the carpet, then at her.

“I’m sorry,” she said, whispering it faintly. Barely forming the words. The newborn snakes twisted continually, in apology.

Jason said, “I’m sorry.”

“I’ll put a Band-Aid on it.” She started for the bathroom.

“No,” he said, “I’m leaving. It’s a clean cut; it won’t get infected.”

“Why did you say that to me?” Ruth said hoarsely.

“Because,” he said, “of my own fears of age. Because they’re wearing me down, what’s left of me. I virtually have no energy left. Even for an orgasm.”

“You did really well.”

“But it was the last,” he said. He made his way into the bathroom; there he washed the blood from his arm, kept cold water flowing on the gash until coagulation began. Five minutes, fifty; he could not tell. He merely stood there, holding his elbow under the faucet. Ruth Rae had gone God knew where. Probably to nark to the pols, he said wearily to himself; he was too exhausted to care.

Hell, he thought. After what I said to her I wouldn’t blame her.