“I'm fuckin' out of here,” I said.
“Jim called,” she said coyly, so I stepped just barely inside the door.“What?”
“They're ready and waiting.”
“He found a beachhead?”
“Yeah.” Reading from a note, now: “Dutch Marshes State Park, ten miles north of Blue Kills. Take Garden State Parkway south to the Route 88 exit ... well, this goes on for a while. Here you go.”
“Don't want it.”
“Sangamon,” she said in her flirtatious whine, which had been known to put men in the mind of taking their clothes off. “I spent ten minutes taking this down. And I don't like taking dictation.”
“I'll never understand why people give out directions, or ask for them. That's what fucking road maps are for.”
Outside, Bart blew a few licks on his horn.
“Find it on the map, you can always get to it. Try to follow someone's half-assed directions, and once you lose the trail, you're sunk. I've got maps of that fucking state an inch thick.”
“Okay.” Tricia was getting into some serious pouting; I bit the inside of my cheek, hard.
“Just tell me what time.”
“He didn't say. You know, tomorrow afternoon sometime. Just follow the barbecue smoke.”
“Ten-four on that. And now I truly am gone.”
“Here's some mail.”
“Thanks. But it's all junk.”
“Don't I get to kiss the departing warrior?”
“Feels too weird, in a room that's bugged.”
Threw my bike into Bartholomew's big black van and we headed west. Before going to work this morning, he'd had enough foresight to stop by our living-room canister and fill a couple of Hefty bags with nitrous, so I moved back behind the curtain and jackhammered my brain. Bart bragged that he could pass out on the stuff, but when that happens you let go of the Hefty and it all escapes.
He turned down the stereo a hair and screamed, “Hey, pop those suckers and we can have another Halloween party.”
Last Halloween we had rigged up nitrous and oxygen tanks in one of our rooms, sealed the doors and windows, and created, shall we say, a marvelous party atmosphere. That was the first night I ever slept with a nonprint journalist. But it was an expensive way to seduce someone.
By the time we'd poked through Harvard Square, I was up in the front seat again, watching the colonial houses roll by.
“Yankees,” Bart said.
Translation: “The Yankees are playing the Red Sox on TV tonight; let's stay at the Arsenal for the entire duration of the game.”
“Can't,” I said. “Have to do dinner with this frogman at the Pearl.”
“French guy?”
“Frogman. A scuba diver. He's going on the Blue Kills thing. Don't worry, you hold down the fort and I'll ride over on my bike.”
“You got a light on that thing?”
I laughed. “Since when are you the type to worry about that?”
“It's dangerous, man. You're invisible.”
“I just assume I'm not invisible. I assume I'm wearing fluorescent clothes, and there's a million-dollar bounty going to the first driver who manages to hit me. And I ride on that assumption.”
Sometimes it's nice to get away from the East Beirut ethnic atmosphere of the city and hang out in a bar where all the toilets flush on the first try and no one has ever died. We go to a place in Watertown, right across the river from our house, where there's a bar called the Arsenal. Character-free, as you'd expect in a shopping mall. But it's possible for a bar to have too much character, and there were a lot of bars like that in Boston. Right across the mall was a games arcade, which made the Arsenal even better. Into the bar for a beer, across the mall for a few games of ski-ball, back for another beer, and so on. You could eat up a pretty happy, stupid evening that way.
We ate up a couple of hours. I won about three dozen ski-ball tickets. Checked through the junk mail. I get a lot of junk mail because I own stock in hundreds of corporations - usually one share apiece. That puts me on the shareholder mailing lists, which can be useful. It's a hassle; I have to do it under as assumed name, through a P.O. box, paid for with money orders, so people can't ambush me on TV for some kind of conflict of interest.
I leafed through Fotex's annual report; a lot about their shiny new cameras, but nothing at all about toxic waste.
Also picked up some corporate news from a newsletter: it seemed that Dolmacher had a new boss. The founder/president of Biotronics had “resigned” and been replaced by a transplant from the Basco ranks. There were photos of the founder - young, skinny, facial hair - and the new guy, a Joe Palooka type in yuppie glasses. Typical story. The people who founded Biotronics, bright kids from MIT and B.U., were chucked out to make room for some chip-off-the-old-monolith.