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By Root 156 0

mood, except that for the rest of the night, she kept thinking something was falling out of her nose. She and Billie and three men piled into a large, boaty American station wagon. Jammed in the backseat between two men, Libby concentrated on not looking as tight-jawed as she felt. Billie, in the front, played with the neck and hair of the driver, a handsome, bulked-up blond guy called Mike. Bottles of sweet, strong liquor were passed, then a joint as they drove to a campground on the Kern River. Libby sat on an ice chest and watched a young woman with long, straight, flaxen hair make a pot of boiled coffee over the smoky campfire. They sat drinking the coffee laced with whiskey, Libby wondering why they’d come out here at all. The woman with the white-blond hair went into a tent and, once inside, called out for Mike. He went into the tent and came out almost immediately. The woman called him over and over, at intervals. Mike and everyone else pretended nothing was happening, but after a while he stood up and said, “I’m outta here.”

Back in the station wagon, drugs were passed in brown vials. Libby politely refused. At a new apartment complex on the edge of the oil fields, they took an elevator to a nearly empty apartment on the third floor. In the living room, there was only a wide-screen television and two beanbag chairs; in the kitchen, only chips and hard liquor. Billie disappeared into a room with Mike. Libby sat in a beanbag chair and watched a Planet of the Apes movie without any sound. The other two men came in and out. One said, “Hey, Billie, want some of this joint?”

“She’s not Billie,” said his friend. “Billie’s the pretty one.” Then, hearing himself, he slapped his face. “It’s not that you ain’t pretty, hon. It’s just, well, Billie’s about the prettiest thing.”

Libby refused joints, shots of whiskey, and lines of coke, while sending telepathic emergency signals to Billie. Finally, when the apes were silently clobbering each other in the bloody, frenzied climax, Billie burst from the room—hair wild, eyes half-lidded—and threw an arm around Libby’s neck. Her breath smelled of alcohol, her words were slurred. “You look miserable, Lib. I knew this wasn’t for you. Come on. Let’s get you out of here.”

Billie snatched some keys from the kitchen counter. In the parking garage, moving by feel, she tried various cars and finally unlocked the door of the station wagon. “Don’t worry,” said Billie. “We’ll leave it where Mike can find it.”

Libby insisted on driving. She was so glad to be leaving that driving around oil fields in a stolen vehicle passed for heaven: derricks lit up like Christmas trees, soft cobalt sky, fat stars, the clustered yellow lights of Bakersfield. Billie suggested a turn here and there. Like a vision, the Gusher Inn materialized and beside it, Billie’s enormous truck as white and loyal as Trigger.

Libby touched Billie’s shoulder. “Sorry to truncate your creep.”

“I knew you weren’t creep material. I never should’ve let you come.”

“You invited me!”

“I invited you because you were all sad your historian hasn’t called.”

“I’m not sad about that.”

“You’re a total misery guts about it.”

“You’re out of your mind.”

“Your heart was broke and I took pity on you.”

“I don’t even know the guy. I just went out with him once.”

“Your heart is in a zillion beensie pieces.”

Libby drove home. The dual wheels whistled on the asphalt. Billie slumped against the door, passed out. Libby listened to a talk show on the radio. One of the guests had taken a nationwide poll on happiness. Statistically, the woman said, the two happiest groups in America were married men and women who’d never been married.

“That’s me!” Billie sprang up. “What have I been telling you? I’m one of the happiest people in America. Aren’t you jealous? Don’t you wish you’d never been married?”

My mouth tastes like an electrical short, Libby wrote. My eyeballs are dry. My nose is packed with crystallized scabs which bleed when picked. I am not fishing—the first Sunday I’ve missed in a year.

I’m depressed, thanks, I think, to the cocaine.