“There’s talk of pancakes,” Goya said. “Becky wants midnight pancakes, and who could blame her? Kim’s going. And whither Kim goest…”
“We could catch up with them later.”
The desperate edge in Perry’s voice seemed to cut through Goya’s mellowness. His eyes, though red, became alert. “Is something up with you?”
The cosmos was unjust. By dallying in conversation with his mother, Perry had made himself too late to procure relief from the disturbance the conversation had caused him, whereas, if he’d skipped the conversation and come to the concert earlier, when drugs were still available, he wouldn’t have been disturbed and could have stuck to his resolution.
“I just,” he said. “I, uh. Is—who’s going?”
“Kim, Becky, me. Tanner, too, I think. Maybe others.”
Perry saw an idea and pounced on it. “The band has to pack up. If we go right now, we’ll be back in plenty of time.”
The idea was rational and easily realized, but Goya was too stoned or too stubborn to see it. “Is something wrong?”
“No. No.”
“Then let’s not do this.”
A tremendous closing cheer went up in the function hall. Goya turned and went back in, and Perry, after a hesitation, followed. One might have expected an encore, but Laura Dobrinsky was hopping down from the stage. She lowered her head and charged into the crowd, jostling Perry as she hurried out the door. Over his shoulder, he saw her sprinting down the hallway.
The house lights had come up, and Tanner Evans, too, was in the crowd, his hair damp with musical exertion. He shook the modster’s hand and draped his arm around Becky. Perry couldn’t see her face, but he could see the few people who’d hugged him, the many who hadn’t. Every one of them was looking at his sister, who had both arms around Tanner Evans. She’d been in Crossroads for less than two months, and already, it was clear, she’d leaped past Perry and advanced to the center of it.
How happy her soul must have been with the person in whom it had chanced to land.
From the ensuing blackness in his head, he’d returned to himself on Pirsig Avenue, walking with apparent intention toward the Shell station. In his wallet were twenty-three dollars, currently earmarked for Christmas presents for Becky, Clem, and the Reverend, but the world wouldn’t end if he spent only a few dollars on each of them. He also had coins in the flat, clear-plastic coin purse that Judson had given him for his birthday. Reaching the gas station, he took a dime from the purse and put it in the frigid pay phone by the restrooms. Behind him, in the snow, a tow truck idled with its roof lights flashing, no driver at the wheel. The phone number, 241–7642, was a cinch to remember, the fourth digit being the sum of the first three, which also recurred in the decimal inverse of the fourth, and the concluding two-digit number being the product of the two foregoing integers.
The guy answered on the sixth ring. Perry got no further than pronouncing his first and last names when the guy interrupted him. “Sorry, man. Closed for the holidays.”
“It’s something of an emergency.”
The guy hung up on him.
At this point, Perry might wisely have conceded defeat and gone back to First Reformed to content himself with whatever bottle Larry Cottrell had managed to poach, but Larry’s success was by no means assured, perhaps more like the opposite, and Perry had money, the guy had drugs—what could be simpler?
He’d been to the guy’s house only once, not to cop but simply to be introduced to him by a disagreeable upperclassman, Randy Toft, who’d been Keith Stratton’s dealer. Subsequent guy–Perry meetings had occurred among potholes in the parking lot behind the old A&P, which was boarded up but not yet demolished or repurposed, and had invari ably involved lengthy waiting for the guy’s anonymous white Dodge to nose into view, Perry stewing about his lack of punctuality but never brave enough, when the guy finally arrived, to raise the issue. Both of them knew who had the power and who didn’t.
The house was easy to find again, because it was on a dead-end street by the cheerful name of Felix and its street-side mailbox bore a weathered NIXON AGNEW bumper sticker, possibly humor, possibly a red herring for the township police, or possibly, who could say, a heartfelt statement. As Perry came up the street named Felix toward the rail embankment, he saw the white Dodge in the driveway, buried in whiter snow. Light showed around the edges of sagging shades in the house’s living-room windows. The front walk was unshoveled, altogether untrodden.