“Hey, wait, man, where you going?”
“It was nice to meet you both.”
“You said money. What’s your money?”
“Do you mean, is it legal tender?”
“How much you got? Twenty?”
Offended, he turned back to them. “A pound of peyote for twenty dollars? I have a hundred fifty times that much.”
This disclosure ended the hilarity. The groovier Navajo asked him, with a frown, what he knew about peyote.
“I know that it’s a powerful hallucinogen employed in Navajo ceremonies.”
“That’s wrong. Peyote isn’t Navajo.”
No word in the world hurt more than wrong. All his life, it had made Perry want to cry.
“That’s disappointing,” he said.
“Peyote’s not our thing,” the groovier fellow said. “It’s only for people in the church.”
“They take it and they sweat,” his friend said.
“It doesn’t even grow here. It comes from Texas.”
“I see,” Perry said.
Out of the now revealed imperfection of his knowledge rose a weariness compounded over many weeks of sleepless nights, a weariness so immense that he suspected no amount of boosting could overcome it. He shut his eyes and saw the überdark speck against the blackness of his lowered eyelids. The two Navajos were exchanging words that he was tantalizingly close to understanding. The gap between knowing no words of Navajo and knowing all words of Navajo seemed no wider than a micron. Were it not for the dark speck, the weariness, he could have crossed it effortlessly.
“So there’s a guy,” the groovier fellow said to Perry. “Guy named Flint.”
“Flint, right.” The younger fellow seemed excited to remember him. “Flint Stone.”
“He’s in New Mexico, just over the state line.”
“Just over the state line. I know the place.”
“Who is Flint?” Perry said.
“He’s the man. He’s got what you need. He brings peyote up from Texas.”
“He’s a Navajo?”
“Didn’t I just say that? He’s in the church and everything.” The groovier fellow turned to his scar-faced friend. “Remember that time we went out there?”
“Yeah! That time we went out there.”
“He had a bag of buttons in his shed. It was like a five-pound bag of coffee, pure peyote.”
“That wasn’t coffee?”
“No, man. I saw it. He opened the bag, he showed me. It was all peyote. He gets it for the church.”
Flint Stone was a name from a cartoon. Perry’s doubts about the story, which were substantial, all emanated from the speck. The speck’s essence was that everything was hopeless and he was deathly tired. For a moment, in the billboard’s reflected light, he sank deeper into weariness. But then—O ye of little faith!—his rationality blazed forth. His weariness was itself the proof that he could go no farther; didn’t have the strength to accost further Navajo strangers. By definition, if he could go no farther, he’d reached a logical terminus. In the light of perfect logic, the coffee sack overflowing with peyote became incontrovertibly real. The surety was the balance of $13.85 in his passbook account, the scarcely larger sum in Clem’s. The only way to replenish these accounts, while realizing a profit sufficient for his ancillary drug needs, was to buy peyote in bulk and resell it at a fivefold markup in Chicago. Ergo, there had to be a man by the unlikely name of Flint Stone, the man had to sell peyote at a depressed reservation price, and the first individuals Perry had accosted had to know it. Had to! It couldn’t have been otherwise, because God had only one plan.
Weightless with logic, ebullient, he’d arranged to return in twenty-four hours. In the small eternity of those hours, the sack of peyote had become even realer, so real that he could feel the heavy weight of it; he could smell its earthy fungal smell. The weight and the smell were a turn-on that persisted through a morning of scraping paint from the side of a tribal meetinghouse, an afternoon of holding forth to Larry on the atomic structure of matter, the creation of matter in a Big Bang that even now propelled the universe ever outward, the key role of Cepheid variable stars in the discovery of this expansion, the unbelievably providential circumstance （it had to be） that a Cepheid’s period of variation was proportional to its absolute luminosity, thus enabling precise measurement of intergalactic distances, across which an all-seeing mind could zip at will, zoom in for closer looks at the quasars and nebulae of its Creation, survey the dark outer limits of material existence …