Lawrence Block - Tanner’s Tiger

The boys were talking, but I couldn’t pay any attention to them. I could listen to every word, very much wrapped up in what they were saying, but my mind would wander off and I would forget their words almost as quickly as I heard them. I had no urge to reply, or to talk about anything at all, or to listen to what anyone else had to say. They seemed to be having one of those long, involved pot conversations with baklava-like layers of meaning and unmeaning, and I’m sure they enjoyed it very much, but it was not my kind of high. My mind was telling me it had things it wanted to think about, and if I tried to fight it, I would only get confused. I didn’t fight. I stretched out on the floor in the relaxation posture and let myself get loose.

I had trouble at first. My head was on bare flooring, and my pot-heightened sensibility made this contact very uncomfortable. After a while (perhaps a minute, perhaps an hour; my time sense had disappeared completely) I sat up, took off my shirt, and used it as a thin pillow. Then I relaxed in the usual Yoga fashion, and the pot and the Yoga reinforced one another, and I went in very deep, very deep.

I cannot tell you precisely what happened after that, because the experience does not lend itself to verbal description. I didn’t actually think about anything. You couldn’t call it thought. I was, in a sense, a screen on which a movie was being shown. There was an endless parade of images, connections made and connections broken, spirited mental leaps, occasional false starts, a touch perhaps of madness, and, well, something else that defies explanation.

Once I saw a Haight-Ashbury hippie interviewed on television. He had taken LSD and wound up in a mental hospital. He explained that the acid trip had been worthwhile, that it taught him some extraordinary things about himself. What, asked the interviewer, had it taught him? “I know now,” said the acidhead, “that the present is where the past and the future meet.”

At the time, I couldn’t avoid the suspicion that someone might have come to this pinnacle of wisdom without dropping acid. Now I’m not so certain. I’m willing to concede perception to that hippie. The fact that he was unable to articulate the insights he hit on does not necessarily mean that they weren’t there. He simply didn’t know the words that went with that particular tune.

I do know that when my high lost the first portion of its edge, I turned from mental to physical gymnastics and tried some yogic techniques that I had never previously mastered. I made my left eye look to the left while my right eye was looking off to the right, and I contracted various abdominal muscle groups that I had never before had voluntary control over, and at one point I either stopped my heartbeat or thought I did, which may or may not amount to the same thing, depending upon your point of view. I guess I could have lived just as well without being able to perform these little tricks, and I can’t honestly say how they might be of value in time to come, but they pleased me no end; I thought of them as physical proof of the validity of the mental exercises I had undergone. If I could really manage exercises while high that I could not perform otherwise, then perhaps it followed that the mental connections I had made might have a certain amount of substance, that they might be more than a waking dream.

Well. That, in any case, is about how it went. When I came out of the trance – you’d have to call it that – I was out of it all the way, wide awake, refreshed, alert. The radio was still going, bringing in nothing but static now. I hadn’t noticed the static before. I turned off the radio and checked the clock. It was a quarter to seven. The high had lasted a little under three hours.

On the bed Seth and Randy and Arlette slept nude in delicate obscenity. They had evidently spent their high making some sort of triangular love, as unaware of my presence as I was of theirs. I drew the tigerskin over them and went into the bathroom and showered and shaved.

I got dressed again and put up water for a fresh pot of coffee. The three of them went right on sleeping with occasional groping noises issuing from beneath the sheet. I ignored these insofar as possible. I measured out coffee and poured the water through it and hunted around for something to eat. I was suddenly ravenous and the cupboard was bare. I settled ultimately for a bread sandwich, a slice of whole wheat between two slices of white. It wasn’t very much better than it sounds.

At eight o’clock I carried three cups of coffee to the bed, set them down upon the bedside table, and shook each of the bed’s occupants in turn until they were sufficiently awake to accept coffee. Seth and Randy woke easily, and Arlette was not nearly so foggy as she had been in the past.

She looked at me and blushed. The boys didn’t notice, I don’t think; it probably would not have occurred to them to be embarrassed about their little homage to troilism. I’m sure they didn’t regard it as an orgy or anything of the sort. Just three good friends getting high together and being friendly and warm and tender to one another. For my part, it was just another item on the lengthening list of things I did not really give a damn about. But Arlette, the Oft-Made of Orleans, was the sort of angel who manages to behave like a free spirit without ever quite feeling like one. I didn’t know how to respond to her, unable to make up my mind whether it would be more insulting to scorn her as a slut or convey to her the idea that I didn’t really care.

So instead I said, “I woke you early for a reason. We have twelve hours before the Queen hits the fan.”

Seth looked at me. “You straight, Evan?”

“Straight as a hoop snake. We have twelve hours. That’s plenty of time. I’ve got it all figured out. We’ll fix things so they pop the right way, and then we’ll pick up on Minna before the sparks go out.”

Seth and Randy exchanged glances. Seth said, “I think he’s still stoned out of his gourd.”

“Sounds like.”

But they were both wrong. I knew exactly what I meant, and I had a hunch it would work.

Arlette didn’t havea map of the Montreal area on hand. She offered to go buy one, but I chose to save time by sketching a rough map on a sheet of notebook paper. The four of us sat around the kitchen table while I outlined the route the royal barge would take.

At a bend in the river, I made an X. “This is where the ambush is scheduled to take place,” I said. “Up here on the right there’s a sort of hill that provides a perfect vantage point of the river. Off to this side is a clump of brush that also bears down upon the ambush point. And down here” – I made a pencil mark – “is a natural inlet, a pocket bay just large enough to hold a motorboat.”

Randy said, “Question.”

“Go ahead.”

“Which checkmark is the Texas Book Depository?”

I looked at him, and he apologized. I pointed again with the pencil. “Now this is how they’re going to do it,” I said. “One man – Claude – will be on top of the hill with a pair of binoculars and a rifle. He’ll pick up the barge just as it approaches Point X and fire a volley of three shots across the bow. That serves two purposes – it identifies the barge positively for the other three and should also slow it down some, if not stop it entirely.

“As soon as Claude starts shooting, the rest of them go into their act. Jean and Jacques Berton will be here in the clump of brush. Or next to it, or in back of it, whatever. They have a machine gun-”

“Sweet Jesus.”

“Exactly. They’ll begin firing as soon as Claude goes into action. The way things are set up, they’ll be able to triangulate on the barge. With shots coming from two different directions, the captain won’t be able to get out of the line of fire. He’s almost certain to freeze.”