Freaky Deaky

Chapter 4

Skip swallowed the tiny square of blotter acid, smaller than the nail of his little finger, dropped it with a sip of beer and got comfortable to wait for the cleansing head show to begin. The seams of the plastic chair were coming apart but it was fine, deep and cushy. The only thing that bothered him was the light, it was so bright in here facing that bare white wall and no shade on the lamp. It smelled like Robin had been painting, trying to make the dump presentable.

Here she was back in their old neighborhood, a low-rent apartment on Canfield near Wayne State, where they'd hung out years ago in their elephant bells, got stoned and laid and would slip off on dark nights to mess with the straight world. Back when this was the inner-city place to be.

That naked lamp was flashing now, pretending it was lightning, streaking across the bare white wall. Sometimes when he dropped acid everything would become suspended and float in space. Or things would come at him, like a person's nose, clear across a room. Robin came out of the kitchen with two cans of Stroh's and sure as hell her arm extended about ten feet to hand him one. It was pretty good blotter. She was speaking now.

"I've missed you. You know how long it's been?"

Only she finished before all the words got to him. This was something new. Skip raised his hand, waved it in front of him and felt water. That's why the sound of her voice was slowed up. She asked him what he was doing. He said, "Nothing." It was like being in a swimming pool lined with bookshelves full of books and a ton of old underground newspapers she'd saved; Robin now sitting against the desk piled with folders and notebooks and shit, the bare white wall behind her. Her lips moved. Now he heard:

"When was the last time we were together?"

Skip said, "You kidding?" Saw dates flash in his mind and had to pick the right one. "April of 'seventy-nine in federal court."

Robin shook her head and the water became sparkly, fizzed up like club soda.

"I don't count that. I mean the last time we were alone together."

"Well, that was in L.A.," Skip said. "Sure, that motel on La Cienega where Jim Morrison and the Doors used to stay."

"That's how you remember it?"

"Right off of Sunset. You walked in I didn't know if it was you or some light-skinned colored chick, your hair was all frizzed up in a natural. I go, Who is this, Angela Davis? Once I saw it was you underneath all that hair I couldn't get my clothes off fast enough." Skip grinned at the motel scenes popping in his head until he heard Robin say:

"You were Scott Wolf then and I was Betsy Bender. And five days later we were picked up."

"I'd gone to Venice," Skip said, "to get some dope. . . . I don't know how anybody could've recognized us, you especially, with that 'fro." And heard her say:

"I didn't either, at the time. I thought, Well, maybe it's just as well. You think it's going to be fun living underground, thrills and chills. I was never so bored in my life."

"I wasn't," Skip said. "I got into different gigs, some a little hairier'n others. I robbed a bank one time."

He heard Robin say something he believed was "Far out." Impressed, but calm about it. Not too surprised.

"Just the one, I didn't like those cameras they had looking at you. I held up some other places, grocery stores, Seven-Elevens. I liked Seven-Elevens except they don't pay much."

He watched her fooling with her braid. As she stroked it the end curled up and came toward him from across the room. Skip reached up to touch it.

"What're you doing?"

"Nothing."

He dropped his hand to the back of his head and felt his ponytail hanging there, behaving itself. He watched Robin take a sip of beer. Saw her eyes raise from the can; not wearing her glasses now. Saw her tongue touch her lips and waited for it to come at him, flick out like a snake's tongue. There was a little snake in her. She could hit you quick with a word or throw something when you least expected. She looked fine, not another one like her. The tongue slipped back in her mouth and Skip said, "You ever get laid underwater?"

"Not lately."

She looked like she was waiting to see if he remembered a time. The same as at the restaurant yesterday, it was like she was giving him a memory quiz, going back to things that happened during the past almost twenty years. She was asking him now:

"Were you zonked when you pulled the robberies?"

"You think I'm crazy? 'Course I was."

"Did you use a gun?"

"Not in the bank, it was spur of the moment. But after that one I did." He watched her take another sip of beer.

"Did you ever kill anyone?"

The sparkling water settled and he could see her waiting for him to answer, then smiling a little, holding the smile on him before she said:

"You have, haven't you?"

"I almost killed a guy with a sword one time. I had it in mind."

"Working in the movies?"

"Over in Spain. But the one you want to hear about--how I rigged a guy's car with a bomb, huh? Blew when he opened the door. I never met the guy or even saw him, outside of his picture in the L.A. papers, after. It was a dope business thing, this guy pissing on somebody else's territory."

Robin kept watching him. Interested but not the least bit excited.

"It was when I was using that safe house in Venice. I'd take a trip some place, come back, and there'd be a new bunch of freaks crashing there. I didn't think anybody knew me, except one time I'm there this geek keeps staring at me like for a couple of days. Finally he goes, 'You aren't Scott Wolf, are you? You're Skip Gibbs. You blew up the army recruiting office in the Detroit Federal Building, September whatever-the-date-was, 1971."

"September twenty-ninth," Robin said, "my birthday."

"The geek says he was in the Weathermen at Ann Arbor, but I didn't remember him. He'd fix me up with weed, all I wanted for nothing--see, he was dealing--and then he put me in touch with this Mexican dude that worked for the guy that paid me to do the job. Only I never saw the guy. Only the Weather geek and the Mexican dude."

"What'd you get for it?"

Skip watched her turn to the desk as she asked the question and pick up a can he thought at first was bug spray.

"I got five grand. That was my price, all hundred-dollar bills."

Not looking at him Robin said, "It can be worth a lot more than that." She was standing at the clean white wall looking at the can, reading the directions.

"Well, sure, it was about ten years ago."

Robin said, "I mean there's a way to do it now with a much higher price tag."

Skip was thinking, Has it been ten years? He said, "It was at least a couple years before we met in L.A."

Robin said, "We come back to that." Staring at him. "You know why? Because five days later we were picked up. You said, 'I don't know how anybody could've recognized us.' Have you thought maybe they didn't? They were told where to find us?"

Skip said, "I thought of that, sure."

"For how long?" Robin said. "I've been thinking about it for eight years. I made a list of names, anybody who had contact with us then or could've known or found out where we were. I've crossed out names until finally I'm left with two and they were at the top of the list all the time."

Skip watched her turn to the wall and begin to spray, her arm moving up and down and in half circles to form capital letters about a foot high, painting something on that pure white wall in bright red. She stepped aside and Skip was looking at:

MARK

"The hell's that suppose to mean?"

He heard Robin say, "Dark hair, brown eyes, nice body. On the staff of the Michigan Daily, sold ad space. How about Mark the mechanical mouth?"

"Mark Ricks," Skip said, "sure, with the bullhorn. He'd lather up the students, get 'em chanting, the cops'd come storming across the quad and Mark'd split for the Del Rio bar. Man, you're bringing it all back. 'Two four six eight, organize and smash the state.' "

Robin was spray-painting again, making waves, so Skip waited, thinking back. He could see a guy with dark hair and an Indian kind of headband on that corner by the Undergrad Library, the Ugli, yelling through his bullhorn, a guy with him beating on a tom-tom. Skip said, " 'One two three four, Vietnam's the bosses' war.' With his mom paying his way through school, huh?"

Robin's voice said, "He carried Chairman Mao's red book in the glove box of his red Porsche."

She was looking this way now and Skip saw she had painted another name under Mark:

WOODY

"Shit, I remember him," Skip said. "Mark's big brother. Was always in the bag or stoned."

"Bigger but dumber." Robin stood there admiring her work. "Woodrow Ricks. We used to call him the Poor Soul."

Skip was nodding. "I can see him. Fat, sloppy dude with curly hair. He'd do this little wiggle and pull his pants out of his crack. Kind of sissified."

"Afraid of the dark," Robin said.

"That's right, we'd turn the lights out on him and he'd have a fit. Hey, but he always had dough, huh? Mark'd make him pay for everything."

"That's why Mark let him tag along. Mark would run out of money, he'd get Woody to call home and Mom would send a check. You remember their house? The indoor swimming pool?"

It gave Skip instant recall. "That's where we did it underwater. Yeah, we'd go there weekends to party." He grinned at the memory of that big glassed-in room, voices echoing. "Everybody'd get smashed, tear their clothes off and jump in the pool."

"Sometimes with our clothes on," Robin said. "Their mother used to lurk. Remember that? Never said a word to anyone, but you'd see her lurking. She was a boozer. Mark said she drank at least two fifths a day."

Skip closed his eyes against the naked-light glare, to rest them, and listened to Robin tell him how Mark and his mom didn't get along, Mark being a little smartypants. How Woody was her favorite, her little prince, nursed him till he was about sixteen and they started drinking together. Skip grinned at that. Heard how the dad was gone by then, divorced, kicked out without a dime, the money being on Mom's side of the family. Her old man had invented hubcaps or some goddamn thing for the car business and made a fortune. Then when Mom finally drank herself under and they had the reading of the will, guess what?

Skip opened his eyes. "Mom's favorite made out."

"Woody scored something like fifty million," Robin said, "plus the house."

"And Mark got cut out for acting smart," Skip said, "picking on his brother."

"Well, not entirely. Mark got two million and blew it trying to put on outdoor rock concerts in Pontiac. Usually in the rain. He bought a theater and now he does plays and musicals. I think with Woody backing him," Robin said. "It's a second-rate operation, but it's show biz. You know what I mean? Mark's a celebrity. People magazine did a feature on him. 'Yippie turns Yuppie. Sixties radical cleans up his act and goes legit in regional theater.' I couldn't believe it. They mention Eldridge Cleaver, what he's doing now, Jerry Rubin, Rennie Davis, like Mark was in the same league with those guys."

"You're pissed off," Skip said, " 'cause you never got your picture in the paper. Or in the post office."

Wrong thing to say. Her eyes flashed at him.

"Sixties radical my ass. Mark was nothing but a media freak. He played to the TV cameras."

Skip said, being gentle with her now, "Sweetheart, that whole show back then was a put-on. You gonna tell me we were trying to change the world? We were kicking ass and having fun. All that screaming about Vietnam and burning draft cards? That was a little bitty part of it. Getting stoned and laid was the trip. Where's everybody now? We've come clear around to the other side, joined the establishment."

"Some have," Robin said.

Look at her telling him that with a straight face. Skip stared at the red names shimmering there on the wall, flashing at him.

WOODY

"Mellow me down with the acid," Skip said, "paint the names on big so they'll burn into my brain. You been taking me back to those days of rage and revolution, huh? I'm into a goof, but I can hear and think. What I don't see are Mark and Woody snitching on us. They weren't into anything heavier than a peace march. What'd they know about our business? Nothing."

Robin said, "They knew I was meeting you in L.A. Mark did. I saw him just before I left."

"Well, that doesn't mean he told where to find us."

"Skip, I have a feeling, okay? I know he did."

Man, she did not like to be argued with. Never did. It tightened up her face, put a killer look in her eyes.

"Okay, they informed on us and now they're sitting on fifty million bucks. You look around this dump you're living in and you feel they owe you something. Am I telling it right?"

"We feel they owe us something," Robin said.

"Fine. How much?"

"Pick a number," Robin said. "How about seven hundred thousand? Ten grand for every month we spent locked up. Three fifty apiece."

"I was in longer than you."

"A few months. I'm trying to keep it simple."

"Okay, how do we go about getting it?"

"I ask for it as a loan."

"Seven hundred big ones. I can imagine what they'll tell you."

"Maybe the first time I call."

"Then what?"

"Then late one night their theater blows up."

Skip said, "Hey, shit," grinning at her. "The subtle approach, blow up their fucking theater. I love it."

"The smoke clears, I try again."

"Pay up or else."

"No. This isn't extortion, I'm asking for a loan."

"That what you're gonna tell the cops?"

"I haven't threatened anyone."

"They're still gonna be all over us. Shit, me especially, I'm the powderman."

She was shaking her head at him in slow motion.

"They won't know anything about you, you'll be at Mother's. She's on a three-month cruise, you'll have the whole house to yourself."

Skip felt himself getting into it, wanting to move around. "I'd have to line up some explosives. Keep it at Mommy's. Man, I love dynamite, and I never get to use it. Dynamite and acid, man, that'll Star Trek you back to good times. The way it was."

Robin was smiling at him, raising her arms, and her arms reached him way before she did. Her hands came to rest on his shoulders. He had to tilt his head back to look up at her face, at her pale skin stretched over bone, her cheeks hollow, sunken in. He could see what her skull looked like in there. He could see hands holding her bare skull and a teacher voice in his mind saying this was a woman thirty-five to forty, a hunter. The voice saying, Look at the fucking teeth on her, this was a man-eater.

The jaw in the skull moved. Robin said:

"From that time we first met--oh, but we freaked them out, didn't we?"

Skip blinked, feeling his eyes wet. "You know it. Couple of the baddest motherfuckers ever to set foot inside of history."

Now the skull was grinning at him.

"You stole that line."

"Yeah, but I forgot from where."

Man, look at this fine girl.

Skip said, "You're working me over like you used to and I love it. Getting me to play your dirty tricks on those boys. . . . But just suppose for a minute, what if it wasn't Woody and Mark that got us busted?"

Robin's face came down close. He could feel her breath. In the moment before she put her mouth on his, Skip heard her say, "What difference does it make?"