Free Slow Fade by Rudolph Wurlitzer Page A

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