Between the Bridge and the River (11 page)

“Excuse me, do you have a light?” he asked.

She saw the desire in his eyes as he looked at her.

“Stay away from me, I am Death,” she told him in perfect English.

George thought for a moment. “Then I’d expect you’d be more than happy to help me light a cigarette, Oh Dark One.”

“I mean it,” she snapped.

“So do I,” said George. “If you are Death you could take me now and save me a lot of pain.”

George was rapidly losing the ability to give a crap what anyone thought of him, even beautiful women.

Claudette felt terribly sorry for him because she sensed his sincerity and wildness, which had aroused her interest, and therefore she knew that his days were numbered. She lit his cigarette, allowing her hand to touch his.

SAUL SWEATED FOR A NIGHT OR TWO
, anxiety/thinky sweat, not the normal fatty adolescent kind that he usually had going, although he was still pouring out that stuff too. In fact, his bedsheets were soaked in the morning with double the sweat output of a fat teenager combined with his nocturnal semen emissions, caused by dreams in which he imagined himself the Emperor Tiberius sitting in baths of tepid sea water as small carp nibbled at the savory bread crumbs he had sprinkled over his scrotum.

Mrs. Wolf never complained or embarrassed him but she was quietly astonished that the boy had any fluids left in him by morning.

Saul had to work fast. If Leon became popular in high school, he would never want to leave. He would want to stay in Duluth and be happy, have kids, vote. Saul couldn’t allow this; he knew they were destined for greatness and huge cash rewards.

So Saul sweated over how to keep Leon from the damnation of high-school popularity until he remembered his dear mother and her Munchausen by Proxy. It was this that inspired him to embark on a short course of therapeutic poisoning.

Bad acid is like a taxi. You can never find it when you need it. For Saul to work his magic on his brother he needed some nasty, powerful, and
dirty LSD. Not the kind of thing that you fall over at the Astronomy Club, although the Astronomy Club did have a resource that Saul knew would prove invaluable.

Science geeks.

Anyone who seeks true power needs science geeks. Guys who can drum up weird and noxious stuff that can scare the crap out of people. Stalin had the brilliant and troublesome Sakharov when the U.S. had Oppenheimer and his band of guilt-ridden geniuses. You need science geeks if you want control. This is, incidentally, where Hitler really messed up. He applied his ludicrous racial agenda to the universities before he even invaded Poland. He didn’t want Jews running things in the places of learning. Too dangerous. He exiled Jewish academics. The trouble with this policy, however, is that whether you are anti-Semitic or not, you have to acknowledge that Jews tend to be clever, academic, and temporal successes. Success is not reviled in Jewish culture, there is no anti-intellectualism in mainstream Judaism like there is in the breakaway Jewish cults of Christianity and Islam. Therefore, Hitler lost some of his best geeks before the war started. Geeks who would later develop weapons for an enemy that would leave his nasty little dream a burned corpse in a Berlin bunker.

It should be said that Carl Jung accepted an academic post in Germany in the thirties, a post vacated by an exiled Jew. Freud saw this as proof of his anti-Semitism, although Jung hotly denied it. After his death he conceded to Freud that it had in fact been an error and he apologized unreservedly. The courtly Freud took the apology in good humor and nearly said, “No harm done,” but then changed his mind, as that would, of course, have been wildly inaccurate.

Saul needed some bad acid. He needed to change his brother’s mind, make him more malleable. He didn’t know any drug dealers, nor was he likely to go unnoticed if he attempted to buy drugs anyway. This was before drugs became almost curricular in American high schools.

The preparation of the extremely powerful hallucinogen LSD (lysergic acid) is not a hugely demanding piece of lab work but it was beyond Saul’s capability at that time. It was, however, a piece of cake
to a compadre of his, Benny Alderton—or Nota Benny, as he was nicknamed by his fellow geeks, who prided themselves on their witty use of pidgin Latin.

He bribed Benny, a chemistry nut (who would go on to develop a topical cream that, when applied to the penis, acted as a stimulant, producing a thrilling erection, and a contraceptive, and made him five billion dollars before he died at the age of thirty-two in a micro-lite accident off the coast of Santa Barbara), with three back issues of the pornographic magazine
Hustler
.

Hustler
should not be confused with
Playboy
.
Hustler
showed graphic pictures of women pulling their labial lips apart to show their red, fruity inner workings while pretending to be in ecstasy, whereas
Playboy
showed pictures of women pretending to be in ecstasy for no apparent reason whatsoever—perhaps they were excited sexually by being near a fake fur rug or a tennis racket. No fleshy, baboony hangings in the
Playboy
pictures. All the unpleasant nature of sex organs viewed at too close proximity was airbrushed away to make things neat. Nicely coiffured good-girl, All-American Vulvas—
sanitized for your convenience
.

Saul managed to get his hands on the goods. He had to feign interest when he took delivery from Benny.

“Be careful with this stuff, Saul, it’s highly potent. Blah blah no alcohol blah blah induced psychosis blah blah.”

Leon had a massive dose in his Cheerios the following morning. Saul waited as they boarded the Bastard bus to school. Leon didn’t feel strange at all for about forty-five minutes and Saul was angry, contemplating his revenge on Benny, whom he feared had ripped him off, when the fun began.

Deborah Thornhill had taken to waiting for Leon in the school-yard as the Bastard bus arrived. She loved him as only a teenage girl can love a singer. This had a startling effect on the rest of The Bastards.

Deborah’s high-school kudos combined with her obsession with Leon made them much more acceptable. Deborah said she thought it was romantic that Leon lived in an orphanage, and Deborah’s word had real weight with the other girls; therefore The Bastards became
romantic. It became fashionable to be a Bastard. They were the outcasts. The awkward walking wounded. The personification of what all teenagers feel like. Punk rockers.

The Bastards loved this, of course, and were very grateful to Leon, who had become as a god among them.

He gave them coolness by proxy.

Leon got his bag from under his seat (he had taken to carrying his schoolbooks in an old sailor’s tote, which gave him the air of his father in
Anchors Aweigh
—”Nu Yawk Nu Yawk id’s a wunnafil down”), and walked down the aisle of the bus. Saul waddled behind him as usual.

As Leon got off the bus, Deborah began her showy
Wuthering Heights
run across the yard toward him. She did this every morning for two reasons: First, she knew it made her breasts bounce up and down and everyone wanted to look at that, and second, she loved the feeling of being breathless just as she grabbed Leon and kissed his lips. It made her feel romantic.

Leon looked and saw Deborah running just as the lysergic acid that had been prepared by the kid who would become the greatest pharmacologist in the world kicked in.

For the first time in his life, Leon felt real terror. He saw Deborah in a very different light. She was still Deborah but she was no longer the wildly desirable teenage princess. Her eyes had changed. Her irises, instead of being cobalt blue, were now yellowy white, the color of the urine stains on Saul’s underwear. Her pupils were not black, they were red. Her perfect teeth were fangs and her skin like that of an albino turtle. She looked like a vampire squid in a summer dress, blue veins coursing black blood beneath the surface. Her breasts were moaning as they bounced in slow motion. They sang, in an exact impersonation of the New Zealand soprano Dame Kiri Ti Kanawa, “We Will, We Will Meet You” to the tune of the rock band Queen’s “We Will Rock You.”

Leon screamed and ran away from her as fast as he could, his heart thundering in his chest, the sound of a screaming waterfall in his ears.

The other kids laughed, as did Deborah, thinking Leon was pulling a joke. Playing a game. But Saul, the real Player of Games, knew what was going on and he felt a different rush.

The rush of directing the show.

Power.

Real power, the kind unseen by everyone but God.

The bell rang and the kids left for their classrooms. Everyone expected Leon to show up in a minute or two, but Leon was as gone to that high school as Jean Luc DuCan was to the city of Paris, and Saul was going with him.

Acid, even wild extra-weird acid prepared by Benny Alderton, wears off but it takes a while. As anyone who has taken acid knows, the trip always lasts much longer than you want it to, even if it’s a good one. You can get really sick and tired of ecstasy. Many acid trippers have found themselves asking out loud at six
A.M.
, “Oh, when will this fucking hilarity end?” Only to be taken again into another agonizing and exhausting wave of pleasure. It’s torture, and that’s if you’re lucky, which Leon, on this occasion, was not.

Leon heard screaming bats as he ran. The purple pansies planted at the side of the school gate screamed, “Fuck you! Fuck you!” at him as he tore by them into the woods at the back of the school. He stumbled over a vine and tumbled, then fell and rolled down a steep embankment to an aboveground oil pipeline that ran alongside a railroad track at the bottom of a little valley. The dewy morning grass ripped blunt and dirty razors across his skin but he could not bleed because his blood had turned to hard rubber. His jaw and face had disappeared to him, he was neither in nor out of his body. He was in hell. Truly in hell. In a deep level reserved usually only for the schizophrenic, the bipolar, or the delirium tremens alcoholic.

Saul struggled down the embankment after him. He found him crouched under the pipeline trying to immerse himself in the small stones, broken glass, and dry white dogshit that was scattered around. He was clutching at his jaw and twitching and sobbing uncontrollably.

“Saul, fuck—are there ducks in these woods?”

“I don’t think so,” said Saul.

Leon had noticed that Saul kept turning into Billy Idol, a popular-music singer in the 1980s.

“Stop fucking doing that, man, it’s freaking me out.”

“Sorry, I can’t help it,” guessed Saul.

“Okay, okay, what the fuck are we going to do about the ducks? They’ll fucking kill us if they find us.”

“I can handle it. I’m not afraid of the ducks.”

“They’re killers, Saul.”

“Fuck them. Don’t you worry about it,” said Saul, feeling like Bruce Willis, a movie actor who pretended to be very tough in his films. “I’ll take care of you.”

Leon wept with gratitude and crawled further beneath the oil pipe for safety.

Saul had been sitting sentinel for about an hour but luckily no killer ducks had descended on them. Leon was whimpering incoherently, crouched in the fetal position beneath the pipe. (Actually he was muttering the word “please” over and over again.)

Off in the distance, a horn sounded. Leon looked at Saul in panic.

“Don’t worry. It’s a train. It’s come to rescue us from the ducks.”

“Oh, thank you God, thank you God,” intoned Leon as he rocked back and forth.

The train, one of the mile-long, slow-moving freighters that crisscross Georgia and the South, rumbled toward them at an agonizing twenty miles an hour. As the noise of the nearing train built, Saul kept softly telling Leon that it was all right, everything was fine, that the train was good and it was the ducks that were evil. Leon hyper-ventilated but didn’t leave his crouch.

As the train was about to pass by them, it stopped, as they periodically do, waiting for a signal to proceed from further down the line.

Saul knew this was a decisive moment in his life.

“Shit!” he yelled. “Ducks, fucking ducks, Leon—run!”

Leon sprang up and ran in little circles like a mad whippet. Saul grabbed him, turned him to face the train.

“Quick, jump on. It’s our only hope.”

Leon bolted for the train, his brother struggling to keep up. They clambered aboard a giant rusting metal car that was laden with twenty tons of coal. Saul panted up the ladder behind Leon and collapsed next to him on the coal heap just as the train ground back into motion.

Saul laughed. “Fuck, we made it!”

Leon started laughing too, delighted to escape. “Thank you God, thank you Allah, thank you Buddha, thank you whoever you are!” he screamed, covering his options.

He lay back on the dirty black carbon and looked at the white-blue space of sky and laughed and laughed and laughed.

He was still laughing eight hours later after Saul had fallen asleep and the train passed over the state line into northern Florida.

The truth is that Leon, like a lot of those—maybe everyone—who trips on acid, never really came back. He recovered but he was never the same guy again. He had lost something—innocence of hell. Acid presses a little button in your mind that should never be pressed.

The coal train was stopped in some rural yard when Saul woke from his nap. Leon was gazing out into the sunset, which had turned the sky to the north an eerie pale green.

Saul looked at the back of Leon’s head. He waited until his brother spoke first.

“Well . . . that happened.”

“You okay?”

“Yeah,” said Leon, sounding like himself again. “Man, that was fucking weird.”

Saul was a little scared, he didn’t know how to read this. “You remember everything?”

“Sort of. I think someone must have spiked me acid or something, some prick jealous I was boning Deborah.”

“You wanna go back?” asked Saul.

“No fucking way. I’d be scared to even have a cup of coffee or a soda. Next time it might be rat poison or something. Mom isn’t the only crazy person in the world, obviously.”