Crossroads

Weightless with logic, ebullient, he’d arranged to return in twenty-four hours. In the small eternity of those hours, the sack of peyote had become even realer, so real that he could feel the heavy weight of it; he could smell its earthy fungal smell. The weight and the smell were a turn-on that persisted through a morning of scraping paint from the side of a tribal meetinghouse, an afternoon of holding forth to Larry on the atomic structure of matter, the creation of matter in a Big Bang that even now propelled the universe ever outward, the key role of Cepheid variable stars in the discovery of this expansion, the unbelievably providential circumstance (it had to be) that a Cepheid’s period of variation was proportional to its absolute luminosity, thus enabling precise measurement of intergalactic distances, across which an all-seeing mind could zip at will, zoom in for closer looks at the quasars and nebulae of its Creation, survey the dark outer limits of material existence …

Along the deserted road to the gas station were mercury-vapor lights that seemed weaker than those in New Prospect, as if Navajo impoverishment extended even to amperage. The air had an acrid scent of burned heating oil, and the only glow of warmth was in his head. He considered the possibility that he’d erred in not wearing long johns and a second sweater before dismissing it as incompatible with perfect foresight. His nose and mouth were so numb that his snot ran onto his chin before he noticed it. He pushed it into his mouth and savored the everfreshness of the naturally derived substance dissolved in it. Conceivably he’d snorted more than half a gram …

The gas station was closed. Standing outside its dark office were the scar-faced fellow and, smoking a cigarette, a shaggy figure Perry didn’t recognize. Mr. Stone, I presume? The figure was much younger than he’d imagined Flint.

“This is my cousin,” the scar-faced fellow said. “He’s driving.”

The cousin had a thick neck and radiated stupidity. Types of this sort haunted the high-school locker room.

“Where is our other friend?” Perry said.

“He’s not coming.”

“That’s a pity.”

The cousin threw his cigarette toward the gas pumps, as though daring them to ignite (stupid), and walked over to a dusty station wagon parked in shadow. When Perry saw that the car was of the same make and model as the Reverend’s, and of similarly advanced decrepitude, he felt a pinprick on his scalp. Pure goodness and rightness coursed through him, washing away his last lingering speck-sponsored doubts. The cousin’s vehicle had to be a Plymouth Fury. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be!

He wouldn’t have guessed the speeds of which a Fury was capable. On the state highway, from the back seat, he saw the speedometer needle enter regions that recalled his overindulgence in the bathroom. But there had been no overindulgence, and the cousin wasn’t stupid. To the contrary, his driverly intelligence was profound. Lone lights flashed by like the galaxies God glimpsed in his zooming. Supernaturally invisible, slouched behind two Indian heads silhouetted like rock formations in a desert lit by headlights, he stickied his finger inside the tainted canister and applied it to his gums and nostrils. He took a deep, sweetened breath and sniffed repeatedly.

“You can totally trust me,” he said. “I couldn’t be more perfectly indifferent to the particulars of our buttons’ provenance. Whether every last link in the chain of possession was strictly legal is no concern of mine. Indeed, I might argue that larceny, being forbidden, entails a level of risk that could be considered hard labor, as deserving of reward as any other form of labor.”

He chuckled, divinely pleased with himself.

“The counterargument would be that larceny deprives a second party of the fruits of his own hard labor, and it becomes an interesting economic question—how value is created, how lost. If we had time and you had basic algebra, we could look into the mathematics of larceny—whether it really is zero-sum or whether there’s some x factor that we’re failing to account for, some hidden deficit in the party who’s been stolen from. Although, again, for the narrow purposes of our transaction, it’s no concern of mine. By the same token, if there’s one link in the chain that you don’t have to—”

“Man, what are you saying?”

“I’m saying that however legitimate, or perhaps less than legitimate—”

“Why are you talking? Shut up.”

His scar-faced best of buddies! Perry giggled at how colossally he loved him. That God had chosen specially to favor a disfigured Navajo whose education had probably ended in eighth grade: all the angels in heaven were laughing with Him.

“What’s so funny? What are you laughing at?”

“Stop laughing,” the cousin said. “Shut up.”

He kept laughing, but at a wavelength deeper than hearing, a radio or telepathic wavelength that entered every heart, waking or sleeping, around the world, and brought a comfort that human understanding could not explain. Into his own hearing came a multitude of voices, a collective murmur of gratitude and gladness. One voice, rising above the murmur, distinctly said, “That’s a crock.”