Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack! (7 page)

Then one of the bodies on the rug began to twitch slightly. The body belonged to a short black-haired boy whose eyes were closed; his thumb was in his mouth. First his legs jerked. Then he began whimpering. Then he rolled over on his side and drew his knees up to his chest.

He pulled his thumb out of his mouth and said, “It’s so dark. I’m afraid in here.”

P. John whispered to Tucker, “He’s supposed to be in the womb.”

“In what room?” Tucker whispered back.

“In his mother’s
womb
!” P. John said.

Mrs. Hocker said, “Quiet, please. Go on, Marcus.”

“I’m afraid of everything,” Marcus continued. “I am afraid to stay and more afraid to go out into the world. I don’t think I can. … I can’t.”

“Oh, yes, you can,” Mrs. Hocker said softly. “We want you in the world.”

“You do?” Marcus said. He began to whimper again. “No, no, no.”

“We want you in our world, Marcus,” Mrs. Hocker said. “We love you.”

Mr. Hocker was sitting in the center of the room with his palm gripping his mouth, frowning. Natalia was beside him, staring down at her patent-leather shoes as though there was something highly interesting reflected in the shine. Dinky sat at the far end of the circle chewing gum and jiggling one knee compulsively.

Then Marcus rolled over on his stomach, stretched out, and began flailing clenched fists, banging the floor with his feet, and making the noise of a baby crying.

“Good!” Mrs. Hocker was encouraging him. “Good, Marcus. Beautiful.”

Marcus wailed louder.

“He’s here now. He’s born,” Mrs. Hocker said. “Somebody slap his behind.”

P. John got up to oblige.

“
Gently
, P. John!” Mrs. Hocker said.

When the next to last junkie was in the process of being reborn, Tucker went to the kitchen with P. John to help him serve the food. P. John pointed to some bowls in the refrigerator and said, “Those go on a separate tray. They’re just for Susan and me.”

Scotch-taped to the bowls were pieces of paper with
LEGAL
written across them.

“Weight Watchers separate food into legal and illegal,” P. John said. “Susan and I eat only legal food.”

The illegal food was overstuffed sandwiches on rye bread. The legal food was celery stalks with pimento strips across them; broiled mushrooms served cold on a bed of watercress; cucumber slices with dill sprigs; carrot sticks; radishes; sliced apples with cheese chunks attached on toothpicks; and chilled cherry tomatoes.

“The legal food looks better than the illegal food,” Tucker said.

“Our food always looks and tastes better. You can’t have any, though, sorry.”

“I just ate,” Tucker said, “but thanks, anyway.”

“I don’t mean to sound cold-blooded,” P. John said, “but there’s only enough for Susan and me. She’s lost five pounds already.”

“What happened to her glandular problem?” Tucker said.

“There’s no such thing! Her parents never should have encouraged that idea.”

“Maybe they didn’t know any better,” Tucker said.

“They should have made it their business to find out,” P. John said. “The trouble with fat kids is they’re too good-natured. No one thinks they have any problems besides eating too much. If Susan had begun carrying off the family possessions to hock shops to pay for her habit, they might have paid some attention.”

“She said she saw a psychologist once,” Tucker said.

“She did,” P. John agreed. “Once. … Those smack-heads in the other room have therapy all week long, and Mrs. Hocker spends every Friday night helping them understand their problems.”

“They’re more complicated, I guess,” Tucker said.

“They just make more waves,” P. John said. “Do you know Marcus is twenty-two years old?”

Mrs. Hocker came into the kitchen as the pair was preparing to carry in the trays of food.

“P. John,” she said, “if you’re going to join in the discussion period, remember to be kind. You know nothing at all about Rebirth Therapy. If you can’t be kind, be silent.”

“I have nothing to discuss with them,” P. John said. “My outlook on life is light years away from their outlook on life.”

“You don’t know anything about their outlook on life, either,” she said.

“I know enough about their outlook to keep my money in my sock,” said P. John.

“How nice to see you again, Tucker,” Mrs. Hocker said, turning her back on P. John. “You’re being so good about paying attention to Natalia.”

“Maybe he just
wants
to pay attention to her,” P. John said.

“I do,” Tucker said.

“P. John,” Mrs. Hocker said, “you’re a very brash young man. You do test people’s patience.”

“I just say what I think, Ma’am.”

“I hope Dinky doesn’t pick up that habit,” Mrs. Hocker said. “It’s not a very attractive habit for a young person.”

“Dinky’s not a very attractive name for a young person,” said P. John.

Mrs. Hocker didn’t answer. She was getting ice trays from the refrigerator.

When her hands were full, she suddenly whirled around and kicked the door shut like a punter going for pigskin, with such force the glasses on the kitchen shelves shook.

There was so much noise and movement in the front of the house that Nader hid under the bed in Dinky’s room.

Tucker went back to see her, after trying and failing to make conversation with Natalia. When Tucker last saw Natalia she was cornered by Marcus, who was shoveling down egg-salad sandwiches and reminiscing fondly about the highs he used to get on heroin before he was rehabilitated. Marcus would punctuate every paragraph with, “But don’t get me wrong, man, my head was messed up.”

Maybe it was Tucker’s imagination, but Nader looked thinner, and seemed to have back some of her old energy.

Dinky definitely looked thinner, and Tucker had noticed another change in her. When he had passed her the photostat of the newspaper clipping about the four-year-old baby who ate her mother’s hormone cream and grew breasts, Dinky read it expressionlessly.

Then Dinky said to him, “I’m not interested in the bizarre anymore.”

“How come?”

“I’ve got to think about myself. I’ve got to concentrate on getting off all this blubber.”

“Can’t you do both?” Tucker asked.

“I’ve got to read more,” Dinky answered. “P. John has read all of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., except a few stories in
Welcome to the Monkey House
.”

“I only read
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
,” Tucker said. “But I wouldn’t think P. John would like Vonnegut.”

“He likes him because he’s a self-made man,” Dinky said. “He says you’d never find Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., on welfare.”

After Tucker had petted Nader for a while and listened to a little of a new record album, he saw Natalia standing in the doorway. She had her old mischievous grin on her face, and her hands were behind her back.

“Come on in,” Tucker said. “How’s the discussion going?”

Natalia made a face. Then she produced a spiral notebook folded open to a page, with a balloon drawn on it.

Inside the balloon were the words “If I could be reborn, I’d be a—”

Tucker picked up a pencil and finished the sentence, “Aries instead of a Pisces, because Pisces are wishy-washy and Aries are dynamic.”

“I’d be a Gemini, instead of a Libra,” Natalia said, “because Geminis have two ways of looking at things.”

“That makes them two-faced,” Tucker said.

“No, it doesn’t,” Natalia said, “because they’re not really one person. They’re twins in one person.”

“I don’t know much about astrology,” Tucker said, “just that Pisces are wishy-washy and Aries are dynamic. My mother’s Aries. She has a really good mind.” He felt relieved because they were actually beginning a conversation, but then Natalia drew another balloon and passed it to him for his turn. At first, Tucker felt self-conscious playing the Balloon Game again. There was something weird about sitting in the same room alone with a girl, passing a notebook back and forth and writing down things without speaking. But after a while there was not anything he would rather do.

The hi-fi was playing softly in the background. Nader was curled up asleep inside one of the guests’ coats. A light snow was beginning to fall outside—Tucker could see it in the lamplight through the window.

And once, in answer to Tucker’s question: “I think Tucker Woolf is—,” Natalia had written inside the balloon, “fishing for a compliment.”

Which made them both laugh, and was the only way, really, to handle it: not to let it get heavy.

When they became aware of the shouting in the living room, they thought it was another rebirth.

“It’s not, though,” Natalia said after she listened for a second. “It’s Marcus, and he was already reborn earlier.”

“Then it’s probably the discussion period,” Tucker said.

“It doesn’t sound much like a discussion.”

Natalia was right. It was a fight between Marcus and P. John.

Mrs. Hocker had offered Dinky a piece of chocolate-fudge cake which Marcus’ mother had made, and P. John had ordered Dinky to refuse it.

Marcus had taken it as a personal insult.

Marcus had started screaming at P. John, “If she doesn’t taste my mother’s cake, I’ll split, man, and take your left ear with me!”

By this time Tucker and Natalia had run down the hall and were watching the scene near the entrance to the living room.

“You
try
taking my left anything!” P. John answered, standing up to face Marcus, and P. John had a point, because Marcus didn’t even come up to P. John’s shoulder.

“Just
taste
the cake, honey, just a taste,” Mrs. Hocker said.

“Let’s all cool off, now,” Mr. Hocker said.

“Susan doesn’t eat chocolate anymore,” P. John said.

“That’s
my mother’s
chocolate!” Marcus said, crouching like a jungle cat about to spring.

“Dinky,” Mrs. Hocker said, “it’s only polite.”

“I don’t eat chocolate anymore,” Dinky said.

“She’ll have a taste later,” Mr. Hocker said.

“She will not!” P. John said, and then Marcus sprang, catching hold of P. John’s neck, and trying to pummel P. John’s stomach with his fists.

P. John caught Marcus’ arms and twisted them around behind his back, while Marcus winced with pain.

Then Marcus began to cry, and P. John let him go.

“Get out of our house,” Mrs. Hocker said to P. John. “Get out right now.”

“This can all be settled peacefully,” Mr. Hocker began.

But Mrs. Hocker was way out of control. “Get out! Don’t you
ever
come back! Out! Now!”

Dinky began to cry, too.

Mrs. Hocker had her arms around Marcus. Mr. Hocker was standing in front of Dinky, offering her his handkerchief and saying, “Here, here, now.”

Everyone else was just milling around helplessly, except P. John, who had gone back to the bedroom for his coat. He stormed past Tucker and Natalia without seeing them.

The front door slammed.

T
HREE DAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS
, P. John Knight got up in Creative Writing and read his new short story, “Answered Prayers.”

It was science fiction.

It was about a future world entirely under the control of one man and one woman: Mama and Papa. Everyone took dope which Mama and Papa gave them. Everyone had the same last name: Love. The people with high I.Q.’s became slaves, and took care of the machines which did all the work. Everyone else sat around in stupors, listening to television sets saying, “Mama loves you. Papa loves you,” and watching the word “Love” spelled out in endless animated designs.

There were no wars and no one went hungry. Everyone lived like everyone else, regardless of race or color, except for “the brains,” who lived in automated prisons guarded by automatons.

“Any comments from the class?” Mr. Baird, the writing instructor, said when P. John was finished.

“What does the title mean?” someone asked.

“There’s an old saying,” P. John said. “When God wants to punish you, he answers your prayers. In this world everyone’s prayers are finally answered.”

Someone else said, “What about ‘the brains’? Their prayers aren’t answered.”

P. John said, “Oh, ‘the brains’ never prayed in the first place. They didn’t believe in God.”

“But no one has a good deal in your world,” another student said.

“Mama and Papa do,” P. John said.

“What does it all mean?” a girl asked.

P. John shrugged. “It means what it says. It’s a story of the future. It’s a story of what will happen to the world after everyone’s on dope and welfare.”

Someone booed, and someone else called out, “Bigot!”

It was almost time for the last bell.

Mr. Baird hopped up on his desk, and sat with his legs crossed in front of him. “P. John,” he said. “Let me try and speak for the class. I’m picking up their vibes loud and clear.”

“No one else in this class even finishes an assignment but me,” P. John said. That was almost true. P. John regularly completed every assignment. The students liked to say of P. John that he lived a life of E’s, because P. John never received any other mark, no matter the course.

“That’s not the point under discussion,” Mr. Baird said. “We’re discussing your latest work, P. John, and while your imagination blows our minds, your philosophy is often a downer. … P. John, you don’t feel for people.”

“I don’t feel for junkies, that’s true,” P. John said. “I don’t believe in mollycoddling people, that’s true.”

“Hasn’t your own head ever been messed up?” Mr. Baird asked.

“His head is messed up right now!” someone shouted out.

“When I have problems, I have to solve them myself,” P. John said.

“Fine,” Mr. Baird said. “But what about people who don’t have your same opportunity in life, or your strength?”

“You’re not discussing my story,” P. John said. “You’re lecturing me.”

The bell rang.

Mr. Baird threw up his hands. “Okay,” he said. “There’s no more time. … P. John, you could use more compassion. You really could. … As for the rest of you, enjoy your vacation and Merry Christmas.”

Tucker waited for P. John outside the classroom. They walked to their lockers together.