Crossroads

“All I do is talk to you. We’re together all the time.”

“I know, but…” Larry sat up on his bunk. “I don’t really feel like I’m with you. It’s like you’re in some kind of … place. Do you know what I mean? You haven’t even had a shower since we got here.”

If Larry couldn’t see the absurdity of showering, didn’t have a deity’s intense distaste for it, there was no point in explaining.

“I’m trying to be honest,” Larry said. “I’m telling you how you seem to me. And one thing I think is you really need to take a shower.”

“Understood. Sleep tight.”

“It’s not just me, though. People think you’re being really weird.”

Perry now sensed an alliance between Larry and the speck of dark matter, a kindred possession of contradictory knowledge.

“I just wish you’d tell me what’s going on with you,” Larry said. “I’m your friend, we’re in Crossroads. You can tell me anything you want.”

“I think you’re evil,” Perry said. The rightness of this verdict was thrilling. “I think the powers of darkness are gathered in you.”

Larry produced an emotional sound. “That’s—a joke, right?”

“Far from it. I think you want to fuck your mother.”

“Jesus, Perry.”

“My dad’s the same way—I have it on good authority. You need to mind your own business. All you people, just stay the fuck out of my way. Can you do that for me?”

There was a silence made imperfect by a Navajo’s distant hot rod. Larry’s pale face, in the obscurity above, was like a death’s-head. The thought came to Perry that infinite power was infinitely terrible. How could God endure all the smiting He had to do? With infinite power came infinite pity.

Larry swung his legs off the bunk. “I’m getting Kevin.”

“Don’t do that. I was—my joke was in poor taste. I apologize.”

“You’re really scaring me.”

“Do not get Kevin. What we both need now is shut-eye. If I promise to take a shower, will you go back to sleep?”

“I can’t. I’m worried about you.”

However he might extinguish Larry, whether with blunt-object blows or strangling hands, there was bound to be an overhearable commotion.

“Just let me visit the facilities again. I’m having quite the roiling and boiling. Quite the industrial gas factory. Just stay here, okay? I’ll be right back.”

Without waiting for a response, he darted from the room and flew down the hallway on wings of powder. As if he’d sailed off a cliff, he achieved fabulous velocity before hard ground, in the form of coronary limits made stricter by low atmospheric oxygen levels, stopped him dead. He turned, gasping, to see if the evil one had left their room. Not a sound!

The dormitory doors were locked at night, but from the lounge’s window to the pavement was a jump (or climb, as the case would later be) of only five feet. Outside, in freezing air, he paused to touch the money in his jacket, the canisters in his pants. One more quick boost: advisable? Though he was now perhaps two notches below the most sensational high he’d ever experienced, the cold was bitter. A metallic taste of blood was in his windpipe, and he still wasn’t far from throwing up. Press on, sir. Press on.

The young Navajos he’d befriended the night before were meeting him at the off-brand gas station up the road from the dormitory. He’d found the two of them shooting baskets beneath a billboard for the Best Western Canyon de Chelly whose lights indirectly illuminated a hoop and a crude backboard bolted to one of its stanchions. The younger Navajo had a deep, irregular scar from the bridge of his nose to his jaw. The older fellow was groovier and longer-haired, dressed in bell-bottom corduroys with a large silver belt buckle. At their urging, Perry had displayed his pathetic lack of ball skills, and by submitting to their derision, giggling along with it, he’d secured their trust. When he then broached the crucial subject, their laughter reached new heights.

“But seriously,” he said.

Their hilarity was ongoing. “You want to try peyote?”

“No,” he said. “That is—no offense intended—it’s not for my own use. I’m looking to obtain a large quantity. Perhaps a pound of it or more. I have the money.”

Of everything he’d said, this was apparently the most pants-wettingly funny. His foresight had allowed for the necessity of casting many a line before he got a bite, and he judged that it was time to try a different pond. He sidled away.

“Hey, wait, man, where you going?”

“It was nice to meet you both.”

“You said money. What’s your money?”

“Do you mean, is it legal tender?”

“How much you got? Twenty?”

Offended, he turned back to them. “A pound of peyote for twenty dollars? I have a hundred fifty times that much.”

This disclosure ended the hilarity. The groovier Navajo asked him, with a frown, what he knew about peyote.

“I know that it’s a powerful hallucinogen employed in Navajo ceremonies.”

“That’s wrong. Peyote isn’t Navajo.”

No word in the world hurt more than wrong. All his life, it had made Perry want to cry.

“That’s disappointing,” he said.

“Peyote’s not our thing,” the groovier fellow said. “It’s only for people in the church.”