Rudolph Wurlitzer - Slow Fade

“I’m ready to go my own way,” he said. “You can have the van and I’ll split at the next town where there’s a bus station.”

“No way, José,” A.D. said. “You can’t quit on me like some out-of-town roadie.”

“I’m not up to doing the script.”

“Who cares what you’re not up to doing? If you sign for pay you got to play. I want to grab some of the movie pie. Anyway, you owe me for my eye. If it wasn’t for you I’d be making my normal moves.”

Walker didn’t reply. Picking up the paper plates, he threw the steak bones into the darkness and the plates on the fire.

A.D. reached into his duffel bag and took out a bottle of Johnny Walker and took a long pull. “My days as a backup man are over. I been a backup man all my life, one way or the other. No way, José.”

“Who is this José?” Walker asked.

The question infuriated A.D. “What are you, some kind of off-the-curb arrangement you don’t know the way people speak any more? They must have rung your bell over there. Who is José? José is you, baby, and me and all the fucking people. José is José. What went down over there that you lost it so bad? You must have booked yourself into some kind of religious act. The street is where it’s at now and how to get off it. Dash for cash.”

Walker stood up and moved off toward the looming sentinels of rock.

“A deal like you only comes along once,” A.D. yelled after him. “I’m staying with you rain or shine.”

Walker turned back to him. “It’ll never sell.”

“Your old man will change that,” A.D. said. “Your old man is an all-world pro who’s done over thirty pictures and he knows how to move something off the lot.”

“He has other problems,” Walker said, turning away again toward the darkness.

A.D. reached into his duffel bag, producing a semi-automatic.22 pistol and a pocket tape recorder. “Sing me your song, mother fucker, or I’ll blow a hole into you.”

For the first time in days, perhaps weeks, Walker smiled. Then he walked off into the darkness and A.D. let him go. But A.D. wasn’t going to give up. He was going to mount one all-or-nothing assault. To do this he needed help in the form of a stash of morphine and speed he had stolen from the hospital and hidden in the back of the van. He built up the fire and made himself a goofball. Turning on the radio in the van as high as it would go, he found a C & W station and played along with Merle Haggard and Hank Snow on his harmonica. He sprinkled a little of the morphine into the fire as a kind of offering and settled back, waiting for the necessary focus to crystallize inside him. Then he searched for Walker.

“Walker? Walker?” A.D. yelled but there was no answer. He stumbled, falling to his knees, managing at the last minute to save the tape recorder. He turned it on: “I appreciate your intentions,” Walker’s voice said on tape. “They’re better than mine because they mean to communicate whereas I’m pulled into myself and stuck in the swamp of my own experience. . ”

He turned the tape recorder off.

Walker sat barely fifty feet away hidden behind a huge boulder. He listened to the distant music on the radio and said nothing. But something did, in fact, feel lighter, as if a burden had been lifted inside him, a clenched fist that had somehow relaxed. He was inclined to let out the story, or a variation on the story, since there seemed to be so much pressure toward that end and since he had, in fact, helped create the situation. But he said nothing, feeling relieved that A.D. had decided to go off on his own.

“That shuts it then,” A.D. said. Standing up, he fired a few shots to finalize the deal, the bullets richocheting off the rocks.

He had gone ten steps when Walker’s voice stopped him. “You just shot me in the leg. I think it was on the rebound and it doesn’t feel too serious.”

A.D. sprinted toward Walker’s voice, moving among the jagged rocks like a crazed broken-field runner.

Walker lay sprawled on his back, his right thigh matted with blood. A.D. ripped Walker’s pants with two quick tears.

“It’s not bad,” he said, working quickly. “A flesh wound. Two bounces before it hit you. Don’t worry about nothing. I was a medic in the navy.”

He tore up his shirt into thin strips and tied them expertly around the wound. “If you’re freaked I can get you into a hospital or rob a drugstore. There’s always a way. But like I say, it’s a scratch.”

He drifted off, shifting down from the adrenaline and the sudden confrontation of three hundred mgs of diethylpropion hydrochloride with two healthy snorts of morphine.

“I’m going to pass on the drive,” Walker said, beginning to notice how stoned A.D. was. “Maybe you could help me to the fire.”

A.D. swayed to his feet and offered Walker a hand, and together they made their way back, Walker leaning heavily on A.D.’s shoulder. Once they fell, Walker’s head scraping against a rock and opening a gash across his forehead. A.D. ripped up what was left of his shirt and tied a loose bandanna across Walker’s head, partially blocking his vision. They moved on, toward a glow of embers where the fire had died down and where they could hear a disco beat from the radio.

“Hold your fire, we’re coming in!” A.D. yelled. “We’re behind our own lines and this is as safe as it’s going to get.” A.D. lost himself in a low maniacal giggle. “And you and I, Walker, are going to put it out on the table because neither of us has been dealing with a full deck.”

He dragged an air mattress out of the van and helped Walker to shift himself on top of it, making him comfortable with a blanket and pillow. Then he stripped the bandages off Walker’s leg and cleaned his wound with a fresh handkerchief, working away at each clot of blood as if it were a world unto itself. He topped it all off by pouring enough whiskey over the exposed area so that Walker almost lost consciousness.

“Now, now,” A.D. whispered, pouring two large lines of morphine onto a pocket mirror and producing a cut-off straw from his pocket. “Snort on this here coup de grace, old buddy.”

Walker did as he was told, content to lie back and be administered to, watching A.D. build up the fire and open a can of chicken soup to heat over the Coleman stove.

“Suppose we slip on back to what used to be,” A.D. said after he had spoon-fed Walker the chicken soup, and the morphine was taking hold as they lay on their backs pinned to the vast night sky. “I believe it was Jim and his wife, Lacey, looking for sister Clementine who had stepped off the curb in India, or was it Bali?”

“India,” Walker murmured. The soft sweet smell of his own species’ shit was what he had noticed first and the freak-out of having one of his bags stolen by a stoned and starving French hippie dressed as a sadhu in a torn dhoti and shaved head. From that first ludicrous moment he had experienced a violent fear of and estrangement from the whole place that was never really to leave him, whereas his wife, to her amazement as well as his, had immediately felt the opposite, as if she had finally found her true home.

“As I recollect the story,” A.D. said dreamily, pushing the button on the tape recorder, “Jim and Lacey were slugging on each other right from the bell. Their whole scene was on the rocks except for an occasional wrathful fuck, which is what we open up on, but both of them are too guilty and uptight to cop to it. Lacey didn’t want to go to India in the first place because she felt too attached to her social scene, but she sure as hell wasn’t going to let Jim go because a part of her knew that once he got away, that was it, going going gone and no matter how much she might want to see him cut up in little pieces and scattered to the wind, it was her that was going to walk out the door, not him. . And Jim, he was looking for a way to cut loose and he wanted to go quick before Clem came back, because all the time he never really thought she was in danger, just off on some adventure and not telling the old man was her way of telling herself she was on her own. He didn’t like working for his old man, didn’t like his friends, didn’t like his car, didn’t like his house, didn’t like the second-rate mistress he had stashed in Chicago, in fact, he didn’t like his whole shot. . he was that strung out with himself. . How does that sound?”