Free Slow Fade by Rudolph Wurlitzer Page B

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?”
    “I suppose it was a little like that,” Walker said softly, not able really to remember. “More or less like that . . . except there were the pleasures . . . the terrifying pleasures, running from one to the other, and always money, piling up money, making deals, always that . . . obsession with the next high roll . . . manipulating.”
    “Where would we cut to from the last scene?” A.D. asked, trying to push it along, resisting an impulse to let the stars devour him. “You remember that weird scene