THE SUBWAY COLLECTION-A Box Set of 8 Dark Stories to Read on the Go (15 page)

             
Bobby found me two months later. I didn't think he could, but the street talked. That's what the street did best in Haight-Ashbury in 1967, talk and sell shit.

             
Someone told him I'd crashed with a girl everyone called "Petunia"-- Pet, for short. She had a two-room dump on the ground floor of a dilapidated, condemned building just three blocks off the main drag. The only working toilet was on the second floor and the way it worked was we poured a bucket of water into it. Bathing, when it was done, came from the same bucket. But the pad was free, who was going to complain?

             
I was nearly bummed out with the hippie crowd. That's what you said then--bummed, crashed, talking shit in the pad. I thought hippies would be fun, the sex fantastic, the drugs more than adequate.

             
The truth was the people in the midst of this revolution were crazy as hell, the sex, when you could get it, was listless and uninspiring, and the drugs gave me ultra-paranoid dreams where ten-foot tall cats tried to scratch out my eyes. So much for the golden west and the counterculture movement. Just one more demonstration of a social experiment gone wrong, one more example of bad taste.

             
Pet was a sweetheart, though, and even if she slept all day and hallucinated all night, she was good people. If the hippie heart was to be found, she had it cornered. I needed clothes, she went scavenging and brought back brocaded vests, silk pants, rich, colored scarves. I got hungry, she disappeared and returned laden down with a feast extraordinaire, everything from pizza to chicken soup and sardines, to plums so purple and ripe they made your mouth run water just to look at them. I don't know how she did it, but she knew how to supply our two rooms with everything but electricity. And she was working on that.

             
Sweeping long dishwater blond hair from her sleepy, hooded brown eyes she said, "Babe, I got connections. We'll have a free line into the power company by week's end."

             
Pet came from San Diego. "That pit of vipers. Sailor lech types and Chicano macho types. You can have it," she had said of it.

             
She was going nowhere. "This is the best place on earth. This is where God smiled on us."

             
I tentatively put forth the traitorous notion that we were floating through life and maybe should rejoin the establishment, get a job, get a real apartment, make some honest cash.

             
Pet gave me a pained look and took up her place on the three stacked mattresses that lay on the floor. "Get smart, babe. You don't want straight time. It's slow poison and you know it."

             
At that point I wasn't sure she was right. Poison, yeah, it was out there in three-piece suits and nappy haircuts, but wasn't there a middle ground somewhere? Couldn't you play the game and still win? Stealing from the electric company wasn't my idea of making remarkable social progress. It was just a pinprick in the ongoing war of sticking it to The Man.

             
That was the day and the dying conversation we were having when Bobby showed up.

             
He loomed in the open doorway, grinning an evil, twisted smile. "Found you," he said quietly.

             
"Friend of yours?" Pet asked. "He's pretty."

             
So she thought so too. But she didn't know Bobby Tremain.

             
He wore faded jeans and a ripped black tee-shirt. The cast was gone, but he leaned a little sideways against the door jamb as if the leg was still a problem.

             
"Hello, Bobby. Goodbye, Bobby."

             
"You won't get rid of me so easy this time. I come for my car."

             
"You come for revenge. I know you, Bobby."

             
"Hey now, cool out," Pet said, climbing off the mattresses and going to where Bobby leaned.

             
"What you wanna fight for, babe? How about a few tokes, you know, make you feel better?"

             
"You get away from me, you fucking pothead." Bobby's gaze never left me.

             
Pet held up both hands. "Hey, fine.
Sae la vie
, man, and all that good shit."

             
"My car," he repeated, his gaze now boring into me with fire, with fierceness.

             
"I had to sell it, Bobby. So get another one." Saying this did not give me the satisfaction I thought it would.

             
He moved past Pet and limped across the room. He stood much too close and I could smell danger coming off him like a cologne too heavily splashed on the skin. I couldn't look him in the eye. A trill of fear finger-walked up my spine. I didn't remember him being this big, this overwhelming. Maybe the cast had made him seem vulnerable. Without it he was gargantuan, a nightmare, a reject from one of the last doped out visions of cats and bells and Pepsi cans that said things like, "Pardon me while I kiss the sky." He blocked the light from the grimy windows. I backed away, slowly, oh so carefully. "Leave me alone, Bobby."

             
"I'm going to kill you." He said it so calmly.

             
I sucked in my breath because I knew this was the truth, the unvarnished, absolute truth. Grandma hadn't told me pretty boys might be homicidal. But then how would she know?

             
Pet laughed nervously and licked her lips. "Listen, man, that's a little hard for somebody taking your car, don't you think? What if I see if I can get you another car? I might be able to do that if you're sweet."

             
Bobby turned faster than I thought he could. "Sweet, my dimpled ass! Now you get out of my face, you understand? This ain't got nothing to do with you, but if you want, I'll just make this a twosome.

             
Two for the price of one, are you getting my drift, little honey?"

             
Pet changed color. She was creamy California sun beige and turned white as cottage cheese. Her small mouth pinched down tight as a lid on a catsup bottle. Her eyes suddenly blazed with more formidable emotion than I've ever seen from her before. I didn't know if she was impressing Bobby, but she sure as hell impressed me. This was warrior territory and Pet had on her paint.

             
"Out," she commanded, pointing to the door. "You get out."

             
Bobby threw me a dark glance before limping past her to the hall entry. "Later, baby."

             
When the front entrance door slammed, I was finally able to breathe, but not too easily. I was chuffing like an asthmatic.

             
"Hell, where'd that freakzoid come from? That the one you left in Reno?"

             
"That's him. He wanted to shoot a cop. I think we better believe his threats."

             
"And what? De-camp my place? Move in with some heads? Uh uh, he don't scare me that bad. I've run into bad and he ain't it."

             
"Pet, I don't think you're getting it. Bobby's the devil. He's after me and if you get in the way, he'll get us both. You heard him."

             
"I heard him, the sonofabitch, but he won't make me run." She drew her skinny self up and stalked to the mattresses. She reverently took up a dope pipe from the scratched bedside table and tapped crumpled bits of pot into it.

             
"Maybe you better go," she said after she had the pipe glowing, the smoke sucked into her lungs.

             
She closed her eyes.

             
"If I leave and he comes looking, he'll hurt you, Pet. I swear he will."

             
"You let me worry about Pretty Boy. I got friends, you know, who'll watch out for me. But I think you ought to go. You been wanting to cut out anyway. This is the perfect time, babe."

             
She was right, of course. I had to get away. If I wasn't around maybe he would come for me, leave Pet alone. But what if he didn't? How would I live with that?

             
"I'll take off tomorrow," I said, sighing. I pushed aside the tie-dyed curtains over the stained sink.

             
"Right now I'll make some tea to calm me down. And I'll take a few tokes on what you've got, if you want to share."

             
"Tea? Bucket's upstairs. Upstairs is the bucket," Pet said dreamily. "Right by the toilet, where it is, you know, that's where the water is, in the bucket, the fucking bucket's big as the fucking toilet bowl, holds plenty..."

             
"Yeah, Pet. I know. Go to sleep."

             
And she did, dropping the dope pipe on the night stand and lying back. She was a sweetheart petunia, my little warrior friend, the space cadet who knew how to live free--almost free.

             
Pet slept the rest of the day, as was her custom, and woke around ten P.M. to go tooling the street while I packed my meager belongings.

             
She returned at midnight babbling about electricity and how the current flows, man, how it surrounds you everywhere in a city. "It's in the wires," she said, her eyes darting a glance around the peeling walls. "And there's wires everywhere."

             
I agreed as to how there were a lot of wires, yes, but it was nothing to get uptight about and what had she taken, exactly? It didn't seem to be sitting too well with her whatever it was.

             
"Oh," she waved a hand around the air, "just a little sumpthin special, sumpthin I think I'm gonna like...ummmmhmmmm...like pretty fucking good...

             
"One of these days I'm gonna FLY, sweet honeychile mine!" She leapt into the air, transported into a jet-glide fantasy. It took me an hour to get her down and onto the mattress. She tossed and turned in the dark and made me hold her while she shook with cataclysmic episodes of sudden trembling.

             
So small. Only three years older than me, Pet seemed much younger, more innocent and trusting than I had ever been. Which was saying a great deal considering the mess I'd made of my heretofore young years.

             
I held onto her for dear life and thought about what would happen to her when I left on the morrow. Here I thought she'd been protecting me, providing me with a way to live, when all the while it was I who had been her pillar, her Gibraltar. This was not the first time I'd coached Pet through the throes of a drug-induced delirium. Before it was just something I did without thinking about. It was what we all did for one another. But if I weren't here who was going to hold onto Pet and keep her from flying so high the clouds would claim her?

             
Well, I'd make her go with me, that's what I'd do. I'd kidnap her if I had to, get her out of this madhouse, away from the free-floating anxieties and the paranoid dream world. Away from the singing wires and the pills and the tabs of stuff and the smoke, away from the Bobby Tremains.

             
Pet stopped convulsing and snored peacefully, her mouth open and smelling of an apple she must have snatched from the food vendor earlier. I drowsed, but held onto Pet's hand to give us both security in the black quiet hours before dawn. I didn't like those hours, especially on nights Pet needed watching.

             
At first I thought I was dreaming when I heard a door creaking on its un-oiled hinges. Bobby's silky voice ("Here I am.") brought me partially awake. I sat up in bed, trying to untangle the Indian woven spread from around my legs, fighting with the material, fighting off the deep sleep trance that had hold of my mind.

             
"What...? Who's there? That you, Bobby?"

             
Pet slept on. I gripped her right arm and buried my nails in her tender flesh. She did not respond.

             
Whatever she'd taken was enough to put her out for the long term.
Oh Pet, please wake up, Jesus, Pet,
don't crap out on me now...

             
"She can't help you."

             
I could see him as deeper shadow sneaking across the room, hunched, lurching sideways, something in his hands, something with a long handle, a baseball bat, an axe, something bad, real bad...

             
"Bobby..."

             
"You took my fucking car."

             
Halfway across the room.

             
"Bobby, I'll pay you back. Bobby, I'm sorry..."

             
"You dumped me in fucking Reno."