“How many tabs do you drop a day?”
“That’s very difficult to determine. But not that many.”
“A tolerance builds up, you know.”
“Sure, right, but not like that. I can’t stand running out and like that. On the other hand …” He reflected. “I think I got a new source. That chick, Donna. Donna something.”
“Oh, Bob’s girl.”
“His old lady,” Charles Freck said, nodding.
“No, he never got into her pants. He tries to.”
“Is she reliable?”
“Which way? As a lay or—” Barris gestured: hand to mouth and swallowing.
“What kind of sex is that?” Then he flashed on it. “Oh, yeah, the latter.”
“Fairly reliable. Scatterbrained, somewhat. Like you’d expect with a chick, especially the darker ones. Has her brain between her legs, like most of them. Probably keeps her stash there, too.” He chuckled. “Her whole dealer’s stash.”
Charles Freck leaned toward him. “Arctor never balled Donna? He talks about her like he did.”
Barris said, “That’s Bob Arctor. Talks like he did many things. Not the same, not at all.”
“Well, how come he never laid her? Can’t he get it on?”
Barris reflected wisely, still fiddling with his patty melt; he had now torn it into little bits. “Donna has problems. Possibly she’s on junk. Her aversion to bodily contact in general—junkies lose interest in sex, you realize, due to their organs swelling up from vasoconstriction. And Donna, I’ve observed, shows an inordinate failure of sexual arousal, to an unnatural degree. Not just toward Arctor but toward …” He paused grumpily. “Other males as well.”
“Shit, you just mean she won’t come across.”
“She would,” Barris said, “if she were handled right. For instance …” He glanced up in a mysterious fashion. “I can show you how to lay her for ninety-eight cents.”
“I don’t want to lay her. I just want to buy from her.” He felt uneasy. There was perpetually something about Barris that made his stomach uncomfortable. “Why ninety-eight cents?” he said. “She wouldn’t take money; she’s not turning tricks. Anyhow, she’s Bob’s chick.”
“The money wouldn’t be paid directly to her,” Barris said in his precise, educated way. He leaned toward Charley Freck, pleasure and guile quivering amid his hairy nostrils. And not only that, the green tint of his shades had steamed up. “Donna does coke. Anybody who would give her a gram of coke she’d undoubtedly spread her legs for, especially if certain rare chemicals were added in strictly scientific fashion that I’ve done painstaking research on.”
“I wish you wouldn’t talk that way,” Charles Freck said. “About her. Anyhow, a gram of coke’s selling now for over a hundred dollars. Who’s got that?”
Half sneezing, Barris declared, “I can derive a gram of pure cocaine at a total cost to me, for the ingredients from which I get it, not including my labor, of less than a dollar.”
“Bullshit.”
“I’ll give you a demonstration.”
“Where do these ingredients come from?”
“The 7-11 store,” Barris said, and stumbled to his feet, discarding bits of patty melt in his excitement. “Get the check,” he said, “and I’ll show you. I’ve got a temporary lab set up at the house, until I can create a better one. You can watch me extract a gram of cocaine from common legal materials purchased openly at the 7-11 food store for under a dollar total cost.” He started down the aisle. “Come on.” His voice was urgent.
“Sure,” Charles Freck said, picking up the check and following. The mother’s dingey, he thought. Or maybe he isn’t. With all those chemistry experiments he does, and reading and reading at the county library … maybe there’s something to it. Think of the profit, he thought. Think what we could clear!
He hurried after Barris, who was getting out the keys to his Karmann Ghia as he strode, in his surplus flier’s jump suit, past the cashier.
They parked in the lot of the 7-11, got out and walked inside. As usual, a huge dumb cop stood pretending to read a strokebook magazine at the front counter; in actuality, Charles Freck knew, he was checking out everyone who entered, to see if they were intending to hit the place.
“What do we pick up here?” he asked Barris, who was casually strolling about the aisles of stacks of food.
“A spray can,” Barris said. “Of Solarcaine.”
“Sunburn spray?” Charles Freck did not really believe this was happening, but on the other hand, who knew? Who could be sure? He followed Barris to the counter; this time Barris paid.
They purchased the can of Solarcaine and then made it past the cop and back to their car. Barris drove rapidly from the lot, down the street, on and on at high speed, ignoring posted speed-limit signs, until finally he rolled to a halt before Bob Arctor’s house, with all the old unopened newspapers in the tall grass of the front yard.
Stepping out, Barris lifted some items with wires dangling from the back seat to carry indoors. Voltmeter, Charles Freck saw. And other electronic testing gear, and a soldering gun. “What’s that for?” he asked.
“I’ve got a long and arduous job to do,” Barris said, carrying the various items, plus the Solarcaine, up the walk to the front door. He handed Charles Freck the door key. “And I’m probably not getting paid. As is customary.”
Charles Freck unlocked the door, and they entered the house. Two cats and a dog rattled at them, making hopeful noises; he and Barris carefully edged them aside with their boots.
At the rear of the dinette Barris had, over the weeks, laid out a funky lab of sorts, bottles and bits of trash here and there, worthless-looking objects he had filched from different sources. Barris, Charles Freck knew, from having to hear about it, believed not so much in thrift as in ingenuity. You should be able to use the first thing that came to hand to achieve your objective, Barris preached. A thumbtack, a paper clip, part of an assembly the other part of which was broken or lost … It looked to Charles Freck as if a rat had set up shop here, was performing experiments with what a rat prized.
The first move in Barris’s scheme was to get a plastic bag from the roll by the sink and squirt the contents of the spray can into it, on and on until the can or at least the gas was exhausted.
“This is unreal,” Charles Freck said. “Super unreal.”
“What they have deliberately done,” Barris said cheerfully as he labored, “is mix the cocaine with oil so it can’t be extracted. But my knowledge of chemistry is such that I know precisely how to separate the coke from the oil.” He had begun vigorously shaking salt into the gummy slime in the bag. Now he poured it all into a glass jar. “I’m freezing it,” he announced, grinning, “which causes the cocaine crystals to rise to the top, since they are lighter than air. Than the oil, I mean. And then the terminal step, of course, I keep to myself, but it involves an intricate methodological process of filtering.” He opened the freezer above the refrigerator and carefully placed the jar inside.
“How long will it be in there?” Charles Freck asked.
“Half an hour.” Barris got out one of his hand-rolled cigarettes, lit it, then strolled over to the heap of electronic testing equipment. He stood there meditating, rubbing his bearded chin.
“Yeah,” Charles Freck said, “but I mean, so even if you get a whole gram of pure coke out of this, I can’t use it on Donna to … you know, get into her pants in exchange. It’s like buying her; that’s what it amounts to.”
“Exchange,” Barris corrected. “You give her a gift, she gives you one. The most precious gift a woman has.”
“She’d know she was being bought.” He had seen enough of Donna to flash on that; Donna would make out the shuck right off.
“Cocaine is an aphrodisiac,” Barris muttered, half to himself; he was setting up the testing equipment beside Bob Arctor’s cephalochromoscope, which was Bob’s most expensive possession. “After she’s snorted a good part of it she’ll be happy to uncork herself.”
“Shit, man,” Charles Freck protested. “You’re talking about Bob Arctor’s girl. He’s my friend, and the guy you and Luckman live with.”
Barris momentarily raised his shaggy head; he scrutinized Charles Freck for a time. “There’s a great deal about Bob Arctor you’re not aware of,” he said. “That none of us are. Your view is simplistic and naive, and you believe about him what he wants you to.”
“He’s an all-right guy.”
“Certainly,” Barris said, nodding and grinning. “Beyond a doubt. One of the world’s best. But I have come—we have come, those of us who have observed Arctor acutely and perceptively—to distinguish in him certain contradictions. Both in terms of personality structure and in behavior. In his total relatedness to life. In, so to speak, his innate style.”