mouth shrank. “Today?”
“Yes, sir. This is a matter of the utmost urgency to my client.”
“That damned book.” He sat down heavily in the big leather chair behind the desk. “I tried reading it once. It was the strangest thing. I dropped it down on the desk, right here, to read it, and it was like my goddamn eyeballs were bugging out. I didn’t understand a word of the text but I couldn’t stop reading it. And Daddy wanted me to use that damned thing…” He trailed off, looking down into whatever was in the open drawer, out of my line of vision.
“With your father, um, out of commission, I was hoping you could help me.”
“I wasn’t ready to be president. I’m going to be. But I wasn’t ready then. And I’m not ready for this today.”
“No offense, Mr. Roanoke, but you need to be ready for this. This is extremely important.”
“Gimme…gimme a second,” he whispered. And withdrew an old gas mask, the full-face kind that has the airtank and compressor hanging from the thick pipe connected to the mouth of the mask. I noticed that the bottom of the tank had been sawed off, and stepped in to see what he was doing.
In the deep drawer was a small mountain of cocaine. The only thing it was missing were gulls nesting in the crevices. Tony goddamn Montana would have quailed at the sight of it.
Junior shoved the open end of the tank into the white pile and flipped on the compressor. Enough coke to kill a flock of young tyrannosaurs was sucked up into Junior’s head. He ripped off the mask and shrieked. Bloody residue dripped out of the tank and back onto the pile. Eyes bulging, he looked down at the smashed heap of marching powder. “My God! I see Jesus! I see His Face in these Satanic drugs! I am Saved! Glory Be!”
He looked at my face and laughed. “Relax, sport. I’m just practicing. I’m going to be president one day. It’s important to get these things right.”
“The book—”
“Fuck the book. I’ve just had a religious conversion. Were you impressed?”
“I kind of expected you to be a religious man, in any case,” I said, looking for something heavy.
“Ringo says religion is a political tool,” he honked, squeezing his eyes shut and trying to claw through to his sinuses.
“Who’s Ringo?”
Junior wrenched open the left-hand drawer in the desk and ripped from it a scrawny-looking cuddly toy with its eyes plucked out and awful stains on its mouth.
“This is Ringo!” he exulted. “Ringo is my friend!” He clutched the scabby thing to a chest already pebble-dashed with cocaine, bloodclots, and snot.
My back bumped into the door. “And…he says things, does he?”
“Yeahhhhhh,” Junior sighed, stroking Ringo’s stomach in a disturbingly sexual way.
“Okay. He speaks to you. That’s fine. However, I’d appreciate it if you could save the conversation in your head for later and address the matter at hand.”
“Ringo could speak to you, too.”
“Yeah,” I said. I gave a halfhearted wave in the direction of the stained object in Junior’s fist. “Hi, Ringo.”
“No,” Junior intoned, unsmiling. “You have to press his stomach.”
“Why?”
“You have to. You can’t leave until you’ve pressed his stomach.”
On reflection, I decided that this would be easier than, say, having warm salty water shot into my dadpaste factory. I could handle this. Junior was obviously a coke fiend and a congenital shitbrain. Why not humor him? It seemed to me to be the simplest path.
“I’d be happy to. But on the understanding that we start dealing like men after this, yes?”
Junior held the skinny mutilated horror out at arm’s length toward me. “Press his fucking stomach!”
I moved forward and pushed two fingers into the thing’s gut. A voicebox ground into life with a hideous low rasp. Like an eighty-year-old chainsmoking hooker who hadn’t yet slipped in her teeth.
“Women are best when they can’t talk any more,” it said.
I flinched back, but Junior grabbed my wrist. Tendons stood out in his arm, and his knuckles whitened. He was using all his strength. And it wasn’t all that.
“Morrrrre,” he growled.
I pressed the stomach again.
“Where’s my dinner, bitch?”
And:
“God says queers are special firewood.”
“That’s enough,” I said.
“I said fucking more,” Junior said.
I twisted my arm around and he squealed as his wrist bent, but he refused to let go. I put the base of my left hand into his nose and turned it into a bathmat.
He reeled backward, clutching the toy, his fingers twisted into it. It kept rasping: “Americans are born,