“Momentum,” Barris said. “In a car this heavy, momentum would carry him on by even if he backed off.”
“What about uphill?” Luckman said. “Momentum doesn’t carry you very far uphill when you’re passing.”
To Arctor, Barris said, “What does this car …” He bent to see what make it was. “This …” His lips moved. “Olds.”
“It weighs about a thousand pounds,” Arctor said. Charles Freck saw him wink toward Luckman.
“You’re right, then,” Barris agreed. “There wouldn’t be much inertia mass at that light weight. Or would there?” He groped for a pen and something to write on. “A thousand pounds traveling at eighty miles an hour builds up force equal to—”
“That’s a thousand pounds,” Arctor put in, “with the passengers in it and with a full tank of gas and a big carton of bricks in the trunk.”
“How many passengers?” Luckman said, deadpan.
“Twelve.”
“Is that six in back,” Luckman said, “and six in—”
“No,” Arctor said, “that’s eleven in back and the driver sitting alone in front. So, you see, so there will be more weight on the rear wheels for more traction. So it won’t fishtail.”
Barris glanced alertly up. “This car fishtails?”
“Unless you get eleven people riding in the back,” Arctor said.
“Be better, then, to lead the trunk with sacks of sand,” Barris said. “Three two-hundred-pound sacks of sand. Then the passengers could be distributed more evenly and they would be more comfortable.”
“What about one six-hundred-pound box of gold in the trunk?” Luckman asked him. “Instead of three two-hundred—”
“Will you lay off?” Barris said. “I’m trying to calculate the inertial force of this car traveling at eighty miles an hour.”
“It won’t go eighty,” Arctor said. “It’s got a dead cylinder. I meant to tell you. It threw a rod last night, on my way home from the 7-11.”
“Then why are we pulling the carb?” Barris demanded. “We have to pull the whole head for that. In fact, much more. In fact, you may have a cracked block. Well, that’s why it won’t start.”
“Won’t your car start?” Freck asked Bob Arctor.
“It won’t start,” Luckman said, “because we pulled the carb off.”
Puzzled, Barris said, “Why’d we pull the carb? I forget.”
“To get all the springs and little dinky parts replaced,” Arctor said. “So it won’t fuck up again and nearly kill us. The Union station mechanic advised us to.”
“If you bastards wouldn’t rappity-rap on,” Barris said, “like a lot of speed freaks, I could complete my computations and tell you how this particular car with its weight would handle with a four-barrel Rochester carb, modified naturally with smaller idling jets.” He was genuinely sore now. “So SHUT UP!”
Luckman opened the book he was carrying. He puffed up, then, to much larger than usual; his great chest swelled, and so did his biceps. “Barris, I’m going to read to you.” He began to read from the book, in a particularly fluent way. “ ‘He to whom it is given to see Christ more real than any other reality …’ ”
“What?” Barris said.
Luckman continued reading. “ ‘… than any other reality in the World, Christ everywhere present and everywhere growing more great, Christ the final determination and plasmatic Principle of the Universe—’ ”
“What is that?” Arctor said.
“Chardin. Teilhand de Chardin.”
“Jeez, Luckman,” Arctor said.
“ ‘… that man indeed lives in a zone where no multiplicity can distress him and which is nevertheless the most active workshop of universal fulfilment.’ ” Luckman shut the book.
With a high degree of apprehension, Charles Freck moved in between Barris and Luckman. “Cool it, you guys.”
“Get out of the way, Freck,” Luckman said, bringing back his right arm, low, for a vast sweeping haymaken at Barris. “Come on, Barris, I’m going to coldcock you into tomorrow, for talking to your betters like that.”
With a bleat of wild, appealing terror, Barris dropped his felt pen and pad of paper and scuttled off erratically toward the open front door of the house, yelling back as he ran, “I hear the phone about the rebuilt carb.”
They watched him go.
“I was just kidding him,” Luckman said, rubbing his lower lip.
“What if he gets his gun and silencer?” Freck said, his nervousness off the scale entirely. He moved by degrees in the direction of his own parked car, to drop swiftly behind it if Barris reappeared firing.
“Come on,” Arctor said to Luckman; they fell back together into their car work, while Freck loitered apprehensively by his own vehicle, wondering why he had decided to bop over here today. It had no mellow quality today, here, none at all, as it usually did. He had sensed the bad vibes under the kidding right from the start. What’s the motherfuck wrong? he wondered, and got back somberly into his own car, to start it up.
Are things going to get heavy and bad here too, he wondered, like they did at Jerry Fabin’s house during the last few weeks with him? It used to be mellow here, he thought, everybody kicking back and turning on, grooving to acid rock, especially the Stones. Donna sitting here in her leather jacket and boots, filling caps, Luckman rolling joints and telling about the seminar he planned to give at UCLA in dope-smoking and joint-rolling, and how someday he’d suddenly roll the perfect joint and it would be placed under glass and helium back at Constitution Hall, as part of American history with those other items of similar importance. When I look back, he thought, even to when Jim Barris and I were sitting at the Fiddler’s, the other day … it was better even then. Jenny began it, he thought; that’s what’s coming down here, that there which carried off Jerry. How can days and happenings and moments so good become so quickly ugly, and for no reason, for no real reason? Just—change. With nothing causing it.
“I’m splitting,” he said to Luckman and Arctor, who were watching him rev up.
“No, stay, hey, man,” Luckman said with a warm smile. “We need you. You’re a brother.”
“Naw, I’m cutting out.”
From the house Barris appeared cautiously. He carried a hammer. “It was a wrong number,” he shouted, advancing with great caution, halting and peering like a crab-thing in a drive-in movie.
“What’s the hammer for?” Luckman said.
Arctor said, “To fix the engine.”
“Thought I would bring it with me,” Barris explained as he returned gingerly to the Olds, “since I was indoors and noticed it.”
“The most dangerous kind of person,” Arctor said, “is one who is afraid of his own shadow.” That was the last Freck heard as he drove away; he pondered over what Arctor meant, if he meant him, Charles Freck. He felt shame. But shit, he thought, why stick around when it’s such a super bummer? Where’s the chicken in that? Don’t never participate in no bad scenes, he reminded himself; that was his motto in life. So he drove away now, without looking back. Let them snuff each other, he thought. Who needs them? But he felt bad, really bad, to leave them and to have witnessed the darkening change, and he wondered again why, and what it signified, but then it occurred to him that maybe things would go the other way again and get better, and that cheered him. In fact, it caused him to roll a short fantasy number in his head as he drove along avoiding invisible police cars:
THERE THEY ALL SAT AS BEFORE.
Even people who were either dead or burned out, like Jerry Fabin. They all sat here and there in a sort of clear white light, which wasn’t daylight but better light than that, a kind of sea which lay beneath them and above them as well.
Donna and a couple other chicks looked so foxy—they had on halters and hot pants, or tank tops with no bras. He could hear music although he could not quite distinguish what track it was from what LP. Maybe Hendrix! he thought. Yeah, an old Hendrix track, or now all at once it was J.J. All of them: Jim Croce, and J.J., but especially Hendrix. “Before I die,” Hendrix was murmuring, “let me live my life as I want to,” and then immediately the fantasy number blew up because he had forgotten both that Hendrix was dead and how Hendrix and also Joplin had died, not to mention Croce. Hendrix and J.mJ. OD’ing on smack, both of them, two neat cool fine people like that, two outrageous humans, and he remembered how he’d heard that Janis’s manager had only allowed her a couple hundred bucks now and then; she couldn’t have the rest, all that she earned, because of her junk habit. And then he heard in his head her song “All Is Loneliness,” and he began to cry. And in that condition drove on toward home.
In his living room, sitting with his friends and attempting to determine whether he needed a new carb, a rebuilt carb, or a modification carb-and-manifold, Robert Arctor sensed the silent constant scrutiny, the electronic presence, of the holoscanners. And felt good about it.