And poking out of the car’s open rear, perfect noses gleaming, were three fine surfboards—red, white and blue. He just knew that they would give him the ride of his life—like the Woodie, like that blonde girl.
As he approached the car, he could see that the back was heaped with cases of beer—all import stuff, powerful Australian lagers, which he could never afford. And there was a hefty block of resinous green vegetable matter on the front seat, little glints of gold scattered among the leaves of tight-packed buds as big as his foot.
And standing on the dashboard, glowing no less brightly at noon than he would at midnight, was Jesus Christ Himself, lending his aura of protection and respectability to even the drunkest surfari!
Then the weirdly angled walls snapped closed; the net swung back into being. The guardians leered out at him, as if daring him to seize their precious goods.
“Come on, Delbert, snap out of it!”
He blinked up at Zep. “I think—I think this is magic, Zep. I think I’ve found good luck.”
Zep snatched the ball out of his hand finally, and held it up to the sky, squinting at it with one eye.
“I don’t know about that,” he said after a minute. “I think this is just an ordinary plastic toy ecosphere. But look what’s written on it.”
He handed it back to Delbert, and showed him how when the light was just right you could see a string of angular letters scratched into the flattened base of the sphere.
WRITE IN NOW!
P.O. BOX 8128, SURF CITY, CA
WIN BIG $$$!
“We gotta write in now,” said Del, fondling the wonderful sphere. “Before someone else wins all the prizes. Did you see the Woodie, Zep? With the beer and the key and Jesus on the dashboard?”
“I don’t see anything in there but reflection lines and little shrimp,” said Zep. “This is one of those cheap plastic kits you order form a comic book to grow Sea Monkeys, man, which are in fact brine shrimp. Some feeb could easily have scratched that message on there simply for a goof. But hell yes, let’s go over to the post office. Penny. Penny’ll be there.” Penny was a big-breasted girl with dark brown hair and a wild laugh; Zep thought about her a lot.
They threw Chaos Attractor in the back of the old Chevy pickup Zep had recently acquired and drove over to the Surf City post office. It was cool and empty in there, like a jewel-case, Zep thought, a jewel-case holding plump pearl Penny so cute in her blue-gray Bermuda shorts, midthigh length with piping. Zep was all grin and buzzcut peroxide hair, leaning over the counter trying to think of something to say.
“I wish I was your underwear, Penny.”
“You’d be too scratchy, Zep.”
“Who has Box 8128?” asked Delbert. “I found this magic ball on the beach and it says to write Box 8128.” The reedy sound of his voice annoyed Zep no end.
“Who has Box 8128?” answered Penny. “I’m not supposed to give out government information, Del.” She gave her cute laugh and walked over to look at the post office boxes from behind. “Oh, wow! It’s Kid Beast!”
“That’s a name?” said Del. “Is he young?”
“Isn’t everyone young in Surf City?” said Pen, resting her arms on the counter and her breasts on her arms. “Kid Beast is a skinny punk who talks funny. You’ve seen him, Zep, he played drums for the Auntie Christs.” She glanced around the empty room. “I happen to know his home address because I saw him go in there one time. 496 Cliff Drive.”
“496 is a perfect number,” said Zep.
“What is?”
“Like six is three plus two plus one; and one, to, and three are the numbers that divide six. 496 is…whatever. Sixty-four times thirty-one. 1+2+4+8+16+32+64+31+62+124+248.”
“How do you know that?” asked Penny.
“I went to college, baby. Santa Cruz UC.”
“Let me see the magic ball,” said Penny.
“We found it on the beach,” said Zep, taking it from Del and handing it to her. “We saw things in it. You can keep it, Penny, if you’ll let me tie you up and fuck you.”
“Oh right.”
She gave Zep a thoughtful glance.
“Hey, Zep, don’t give it to her!” said Delbert. “That ball’s got some kind of power—it’s magic.”
Zep sighed, pissed at Delbert for interrupting what had become a promising conversation.
“Why don’t you go out to the truck, Del,” he said. “I’ll put a postcard in the Kid’s box, then we’ll swing by his house to make sure he pays up.”
“You’re trying to ditch me, aren’t you? You want to steal my magic ball!”
“Yes. No. Here’s your ball. Go on, man.” Del went out to the truck.
Five minutes later Zep came out whistling, with a postmark stamped on his cheek like a government lipstick kiss. Penny had agreed to meet him at Bitchen Kitchen to watch the sunset later on. He would get another jay off Dennis at the Pup Tent, then he’d score a bottle of wine and mellow out with playful Penny. Unfortunately it was just past noon. Summer days were too damn long!
Zep found Delbert sitting in the front seat of the truck, staring into the float-ball as if he really were seeing all the weird stuff he’d said he saw. It worried Zep for a minute, bringing him down.
“You still seeing things, Del?”
Delbert shook his head. “They’re not showing me, Zep. I have to be good…I have to do something special for them, I think.”
“I hope you didn’t get some weird spacetime concussion, Delbert. I mean, it wasn’t just any old surfboard that cracked you on the skull—it was Chaos Attractor. It might have knocked your brain into another dimension. You ever see that movie where the living brains come after a bunch of geeks? They’re like brains with snaky whiplike spines for tails.
Delbert looked at him, a little trail of spittle running down his chin. A skinny stranger on the sidewalk ducked down and peered at them, then disappeared. There was something funny going on. Something weirder than plastic movie monsters.
All the houses near 496 Cliff Drive had flowers in their yards and little “Cottage for Rent” signs with ivy wrapped around the posts; all perfect except for number 496, which was an animal house, totally whipped to shit. A three-legged pitbull lay sprawled in the dust of the front yard, angrily barking. The dog’s missing leg ended in a stub that looked…well, chewed. When the dog finally stood up to make its move, Zep kicked it over. It fell on its spine, whining. Using the magic ball for a knocker, he rapped sharply on the bungalow’s front door.
Just then something began happening to the surface of the door. It was like someone was projecting a slide on it, a picture all made of dancing spots whose speckling created the face of a boy. The light flashes, Zep realized, were caused by tiny laser-rays darting out of the base of the ball in his hands. As soon as he’d taken the image in, the laser rays turned back off.
The bungalow door opened to reveal the same skinny dude the ball’s lasers had just drawn. He wore hightop sneakers, jeans, and an old mod black suit-jacket with no shirt. His straight black hair fell into his eyes. He wore faint black lipstick; or maybe he’d been sucking on a stamp pad. He had a leather thong around his neck with a little brass crucifix.
“I’m Kid Beast. You here to audition for the new band?”
Kid Beast flung the door open and stepped back. The room gave off a foul tidal stink, as of a dozen starfish left in a hot car trunk through the length of an August day. Half a dozen aquariums bubbled along the walls and corners of the room, and another half dozen sat dark and stagnant, with occasional sulfur farts bubbling up through the murky scum. There was a drum-kit and some amps.
“Come on in,” said the Kid, picking up a carton of Friskees cat-food and pouring the contents into a black aquarium. The surface seethed with the frenzied feeding of opalescent beaks.
“My friend found this ball on the beach,” said Zep, holding up the sphere. “I think you want to pay a reward for it? I’m Zep.”
The Kid glanced up through the hair in his face. “On the beach, hug? I’ll bet. Gidget sent you, right?”
“Gidget who?” said Delbert, taking the ball and pushing Zep ahead of him into the Kid’s house. “Did she sing with the Auntie Christs? We love their stuff, don’t we Zep?” He broke into song: “‘I am the Auntie Christ! I look like Vincent Price! Wear black latex hosiery! Surfer girl is after me!’”
The Kid flicked them a nervous smile. His front teeth were broken, blackened, in need of caps. Zep was suddenly certain he had seen this kid many times…on the streets, or hanging out in front of the 7-11 at two in the morning, talking to the strangers who came and went, hitting on them for cigarettes and beer money. He repressed the dishonest urge to give the Kid a comradely clap on the back and reassure him that everything was going to be all right. Kid Beast was like a five-car pileup waiting for car number six.
“No, man, I’m talking about Tuttle Gidget, the chip billionaire.”
“Sweet,” said Zep. Everyone knew of Tuttle Gidget and his mansion on the hundred-acre estate on the top of a big hill north of town.”
“Gidget had the Auntie Christs up to his place to play for one of his like society dinners,” continued the Kid. “I bit a live squid…that was part of the new surf-music act we were breaking in. You know, bite into it and wave my head around with the tentacles coming out…“
“Did you get to see Gidget’s ‘48 Country Squire?” asked Del. I bet this ball is from him and he wants to give it to me!”
“Yeah, I guess I saw it. I don’t remember a lot about the evening. Somebody dosed me right before our second set and when I faded back in, the party was over, and the fucking band—my supposed friends—had all gone home without me. I was flaked out on the lawn and Gidget didn’t even notice me. And then I heard the sounds. Wait.”
Kid Beast started bopping around his living room, affixing little suction cups to the sides of his aquariums and hooking lengths of speaker wire to the suckers as he spoke. The wires all ran to a primitive mixing board, held together mainly by duct tape and rubber bands. Strange low noises began to ooze out of his speakers.
“It went kind of like this,” the Kid was saying. “The sound was coming from his swimming pool, and I was seeing colors. Thins like color three-dee TV pictures…one of them looked like you, Zep, come to think of it, and another was like your little friend. What’s his name?”
“My name is Del. I want what’s coming to me.”
“For sure. Why should I see something like Delbert?” Kid Beast shook his head in wonder, his dirty bangs batting against his dark eyes. “Anyway I’m seeing like ghost images and I’m hearing this weird bubbling music from the pool. Check it out. I think would be a great main sound for a new band.”
Kid Beast fiddled with the dials on his deck, and the room reverberated with aquatic belchings and bubblings. He was mixing up the aquarium sounds, wrenching them into obscene configurations that sounded like some mad punker vomiting into the gulfs of outer space.
The Kid looked proud. “Like, it’s so much uglier than anything any other group has got.”
“What happened after you woke up at Gidget’s?” asked Zep. “Did you get any more drugs?”
“Naw, man,” said the Kid. “You’re missing the point. The thing is, Gidget had somebody strapped to the diving board, a chick named Becka. She had her head hanging down over the end, with her long blonde hair touching the water. She was naked, arms and legs all tan, and you could see her T & A regions shining white in the dark. Gidget was standing over her on the diving board, wearing a wetsuit and holding a shimmering ball of light. Like that ball you have. Which is the point of this story. Did Gidget send you after me?”
“Becka?” said Zep. “I’d been wondering what happened to her.”
“I see her,” said Del, smiling and peering into his ball. “I see the girl you’re talking about. She turns into a burrito.”
“How right you are,” said Kid Beast with a bitter laugh. “Cause then the whole pool started to bubble and shake, and this huge orange-striped shell the color of a Creamsicle rose out of the water. There was a godawful smell. The shell tilted back under the diving board. It had tentacles—slithery orange tentacles, hundreds of ‘em. A giant nautilus. The feelers reached up and started writhing all over that poor Becka. It was planting something in her. When I saw that shit, man, I took off running. I wish I’d tried to save her. I bet Becka’s dead now. Her parents think she’s just run away. But the nautilus thing got her.”
In counterpoint to his narrative, Kid Beast had been mixing a nightmarish track that sounded like the ruminations of fish-eaten sailors playing Wurlitzers in a drowned shopping mall. His story chilled Zep, but Delbert was in another world: totally obliv.
“Gee,” said Delbert, glancing up and tossing the ball idly from hand to hand. “You think maybe we could get to meet Gidget?”
“What’s the matter with you, Del? You remember Becka. Didn’t you hear what they did to her?”
“I just know Gidget will give me that Woodie.”
“You really found that thing on the beach?” asked the Kid.
“Look for yourself,” said Zep. “It’s got your P. O. box number on it.”
Kid Beast shook his head and refused to touch the ball. “This is some kind of trick of Gidget’s. He wants to get that ball into my hands—like, maybe it will mark me, put a smell on me, so that tentacle thing knows where to find me. But no way, I’m not touching it.”
“That monster you saw with Becka,” said Zep, glancing down at his hands. “That was just a hallucination, right, Beast? Put the ball down, Delbert.”
“But…but what about my Woodie? And the girl? And the money and everything?”
“It’s called bait, Del. Put the ball in the trash. You’re better off without it.”
But Delbert clutched the little sphere to his chest. “You don’t understand, Zep. You’re just jealous cause you can’t see what I can see. I want what’s coming to me!”
Kid Beast gave Delbert a pitying look. “You know, Zep,” he said after a moment’s thought. “You guys should give the ball to Gidget. Not me. It’s Gidget’s anyway. Put the smell back on him before the nautilus wants to breed again.”
“Shit,” said Zep. He could see this turning into a full-on pain in the ass. He just hoped it didn’t interfere with his evening’s plans. “You mean like take it up to Gidget’s place? He’d never let us in.”