The Hour of the Innocents Read online

  Red tromped up the bleachers and, without breaking the motion, slapped Angela so hard across the face that it turned her chin into her shoulder.

  Angela’s monstrous smile refused to die.

  I tried to clutch Laura to me, to get her out of there. She resisted.

  “Where’s her coat? Where’s her goddamned coat?”

  The young priest edged up. “Does she need help? Sister Elizabeth’s a nurse.”

  The poor sap was trying to be useful, but I turned on him. “It isn’t all peace and love, Padre. Check it out.”

  Pete’s girlfriend, Beth, held out Laura’s coat. Red grabbed it before I could. We nudged and tugged it onto Laura, who sobbed and shook.

  “Please help me,” she said. “Somebody help me. I don’t know what’s happening.” Her voice was as soft as a child’s.

  I whispered to Red, “Come with me. Please. I need somebody with her.”

  Laura had all the symptoms of an acid trip going bad. Given her past history, I feared that she might jump from the moving car.

  Red was solid. She tossed a set of keys to Beth. “Drive my car. Follow us.”

  Onstage, the band played on.

  With Red guiding Laura toward the back door, I climbed the bleachers to Angela.

  “Please,” I said, leaning down toward her. “Tell me what you gave her.”

  Angela raised her bone-hard face. Her smile had faded and her lower lip dripped blood. She didn’t wipe it clean.

  “I did it for you, Will,” she told me. “I did it for you.”

  * * *

  The roads were grim. Going down the Frackville grade, the Corvair was little better than a sled. And I was nervous. Shaken.

  In the small backseat, Red cuddled Laura against her, mother and child again. Laura whimpered. Once, she said, “It’s cold,” in a bewildered voice. As if the existence of cold were a revelation.

  “There’s been some really mean blue dot going around,” Red told me. “It’s cut with something. That could be what she gave her. That fucking apple cider. I wondered why she wouldn’t give me any.”

  I didn’t reply. I was trying to keep the car under control.

  Red began to sing into Laura’s hair, so softly that I couldn’t tell if it was some mick lullaby or a pop song.

  “I’ve got to tell you something,” I said reluctantly. “Laura’s had … she’s had some problems none of you know about.”

  “Everybody knows,” Red said. “Angela told us all about it months ago. We didn’t want to let on.”

  “Christ.”

  “You did your best, Will. This shouldn’t have happened.”

  “Why did we leave the dance?” Laura asked, as if she had awakened, utterly clear of mind.

  But that was one illusion among many.

  “It’s all right, honey,” Red told her, “it was time for us to go.”

  “The music was … so beautiful. I never understood how beautiful music could be.”

  “There’s going to be more music. In just a little while.”

  As we entered St. Clair, a rush of sleet hit the windshield. At a red light, I skidded into the middle of the intersection. But it was all right. Except for Red’s big old boat behind me, with Beth at the wheel, mine was the only car on the street.

  “I really appreciate this,” I told Red.

  Her eyes flashed in the rearview mirror.

  “I guess you know I’m in love with her,” Red said. “I mean, there’s no more point in pretending.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “She’s just so fucking in love with you.”

  “Don’t cry. Please. You’ll bum her out.”

  “I’m not crying. I just keep thinking I could’ve saved her. I know it isn’t true. But I keep thinking it. Did you really love her, Will?”

  “Will loves me,” Laura said, enunciating as if in a speech therapy class. “He’ll do anything I say. Didn’t you know that?”

  * * *

  The stairs up to my apartment were packed with slush on top of ice. Red and I helped Laura up, with Beth watching from the sidewalk. The sleet bit.

  Inside, dripping, Red asked, “You want me to stay? To help you?”

  I shook my head. “Thanks. I can handle it now. Shit, I don’t know if I can handle it. I just think it might be better if I’m alone with her.”

  “Want some uppers? To stay awake?”

  “I’ll manage.”

  She helped me remove Laura’s coat. The scarf I had given her at Christmas had gone missing.

  “I know where we are,” Laura said.

  “You’re home, honey,” Red told her.

  Laura waved her head back and forth like a child. “This isn’t my home. I know where I am.” She closed her eyes and seemed about to swoon. Or dance. We got her into the soft chair by the radiator.

  Crying, Red looked down at her. “I’m going to kill that goddamned bitch.”

  “Angela’s killing herself.”

  “I’m going to fucking help her.”

  I put my arm around Red. Then we hugged each other. Mom and Pop, with the kid in intensive care.

  “I love you,” Laura said. It was unclear for whom she meant the words.

  Breaking free, Red rubbed her knuckles across her eyes. “You were so lucky. I wonder if you’ll ever know how lucky? I’d do anything for her.”

  She bent down and kissed Laura on the forehead.

  After Red had gone, Laura looked up at me with pupils the size of dark and distant moons.

  “I don’t like her,” she said.

  * * *

  Depending on the quality of the acid and the amount Angela had given her, Laura was going to be skying for up to ten more hours. I needed to stay awake, in case she started bumming out again, so she wouldn’t hurt herself. I intended to make a pot of coffee, but first I knelt in front of her.

  Her features were in repose, her thoughts elsewhere.

  “Laura?” I said softly. “Isn’t everything beautiful? Everything’s so beautiful, so quiet. And it’s nice and warm. You don’t want to touch the radiator. Don’t touch it, okay? It gets too hot. But it’s beautiful to sit right here and be warm. Isn’t it?”

  “I want to hear music.”

  “I’m going to put on your favorite album. You can sit here and be nice and warm and listen to it.”

  “Why don’t you hold still?”

  I was holding still.

  “Sometimes, I see two of you.”

  “That’s just your eyes playing tricks. There’s only one of me. Here.” I lifted her hand to my cheek. “Just one.”

  “You’re cold.”

  “We just came in from outside. Remember?”

  “Where’s Red?”

  “She had to go. Remember?”

  “She’s a lesbian. She’s in love with me. Isn’t that sad? A girl in the clinic was in love with me, too. Women think I’m beautiful.”

  “You are beautiful.”

  She withdrew her hand from my cheek. “Why are there two of you? Why does your face have so much hair?”

  I got to my feet and turned away. You just never knew where people would go on acid. Some could seem lucid almost the entire time, just jokey or unusually sensual. Others drifted away or plunged into dark places. People argued over the extent of the hallucinations after the fact, but the effects simply varied between individuals. For me, acid had been a treat that let me live inside whatever music was playing, but I had been able to talk my way out of a traffic stop after swallowing two tabs of the Owl. Other people really did see demons—I never did—or decided to play with knives. During my interlude as Buzzy Ritter’s chosen disciple, one girl with a mild case of acne had disappeared into the bathroom and picked her face apart. Others just giggled and dug the power of the universe.

  If Laura was seeing hair sprout on my face, it didn’t seem to be a very good sign. I worried about the devils that might be lurking inside her head and didn’t want to become a devil myself.

&nb
sp; With my back to Laura, I put her beloved Ravel string quartet on the turntable. With the volume down low.

  “This is just for you,” I said. “Close your eyes and listen.”

  She did as she was told. I slipped into the kitchen, quietly got the coffee together, and lit the stove. It hit me that one more reason to stay awake was to keep her away from the gas.

  I began to cry. Sobbing and trying to be noiseless. Fists on the corners of the stove, I leaned over the coffeepot. It was nothing specific. It was everything.

  I washed my face in the kitchen sink, then turned off the flame beneath the pot and scouted the refrigerator. Eating could turn some people around when their trips were going dark. The foil pan of Sara Lee brownies seemed a good bet, if it came to that. And I always had some Oreos in the cupboard, kept in an old Charles Chips tin to save them from the mice. There was plenty of milk.

  As I poured my coffee, Laura started shrieking.

  “Stop it! Make it stop! Please!”

  It sounded as though someone had slipped in to attack her. I ran into the room, wondering what my landlady would think.

  Laura slapped at her forearms, driving away swarms of invisible insects.

  “What the matter?” I took hold of her wrists. “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s pricking me. With needles. Make it stop.”

  “What is?” I was baffled. “What’s hurting you?”

  “The music. Please. Make it stop.”

  The string quartet’s second movement featured pizzicato interludes. The plucked strings had become needles to her.

  I lifted the tone arm and turned off the stereo.

  “All right? Is that better?”

  “Tell me who you are. I need to be sure.”

  “It’s me. Will. It’s only Will.”

  “I know that. But you don’t look like yourself. Not always. I mean … sometimes you do.” She looked at me with fearful earnestness. “Am I going crazy?”

  “No. Everything’s fine. You’re going to be just fine. You accidentally took some drugs. Things are just going to seem a little funny for a while.”

  “I want things to stop moving. Please stop moving. Please.”

  I wasn’t moving. The room was still. “All right. I stopped. I made it stop. Is it okay now?”

  She nodded. As a contented child might. After an interval of silence and closed eyes, she told me, “I have to go to the bathroom.”

  “All right.”

  She hesitated. “I don’t remember where it is. I should know that.”

  I took her hand, pressed it gently, and helped her up from the chair.

  “I’ll show you where it is. It’s just down the hall.”

  “It’s dark.”

  “I’ll turn on the light. See?”

  “I don’t want to go there.”

  “All right. But that’s where the bathroom is.”

  “This is where we sleep together. Isn’t it? In there? It looks so strange … like a little box. You really are Will, aren’t you?”

  “Who else would I be?”

  “You don’t seem like Will. Not all the time. Will’s so nice to me. You’re nice, too. I need to go to the bathroom now.”

  “It’s right here.”

  She nodded, then crossed the threshold into the light-on-tile glare. I remembered what Angela had told me, lifetimes before, about Laura locking herself in the bathroom and swallowing everything in the medicine cabinet. And my razor blades were in there, the scissors.

  “There are so many colors. I’ve never seen such colors.”

  “We have to leave the door open,” I told her. “It’s a new rule.”

  “Don’t watch me.”

  I had no intention of watching her. I didn’t even want to hear anything. Despite the vegetarian-underground notion that all bodily functions were natural and, therefore, beautiful, I remained a squeamish son of the middle class.

  I headed toward the kitchen to gulp down my cold-by-now coffee. Then I stopped dead. Imagining she might slam the door and lock it.

  I stationed myself in the hallway, just out of her sight.

  She didn’t attempt to shut the door. After a succession of normal sounds, the toilet flushed. She turned on the taps at the sink and turned them off again. But she didn’t come out.

  “Laura? Are you all right?”

  She didn’t answer.

  I waited another minute, then went in.

  She was on her knees, fondling the paisley print on the shower curtain.

  “This is so incredible,” she said. “How brilliant the person must have been, the one who thought of this. I never understood before. To make something like this, he must’ve been a genius. It’s so … so intricate.”

  “The Persians created the design,” I told her. I took her fingers and traced them over a teardrop shape. “That’s called a boteh. It’s a symbol of fertility. Like a seed.”

  She turned to me and opened her mouth to speak. But time stopped. She stared at me, lips parted. After a small infinity, she looked away.

  “You know so much.”

  “I only know that because my father liked Persian rugs. He was a strange man. But a good one.”

  “My father’s dead. I never tell anybody. It’s a secret. He died when I was a little girl.”

  “Know what? I’m hungry. Are you hungry?”

  “You think I’m dirty.”

  “No, I don’t. For God’s sake.”

  “You do. You told me.”

  I remembered. “That was stupid. I didn’t mean it. We all say stupid things.”

  “I thought you loved me. You are Will, aren’t you?”

  “I’m Will. And I love you.”

  “You look like someone else. Your face keeps changing.”

  “Who? Who do I look like?”

  “I don’t know.” She said it too quickly. She did know. But wouldn’t say.

  “Let’s have something good to eat. Okay?”

  She took my hand and placed it on her breast.

  * * *

  Sex could go either way on acid, as I knew from personal experience. But Laura made her desire explicit and I figured that putting her off would register as rejection, that she might obsess about the remark she’d remembered. That could have gotten bad. And the truth was I didn’t want to put her off.

  I tried to be gentle and reassuring, but Laura wanted more. She got the acid sweats and gave off that chemical smell the drug brought out in some people. But her intensity kept her alluring. She cried out wildly, madly, and scratched me for the first time. She didn’t want to stop, and we didn’t.

  We had come to the end of words. Laura had gone deep into a private realm of sensation. I was a prop.

  When she seemed worn out at last, I forced myself to stay awake and massage her. It only made her want more sex. Any observer would have judged that I was taking advantage of her. But she was using me.

  “Oh, my God, my God, my God,” she cried. Then she fled back into the other world.

  Settling by her side, I petted her. Wondering where her soul, freed of sense, had traveled.

  “So beautiful,” she said. “It was so beautiful.”

  “Yes.”

  She chuckled and told me, “What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”

  * * *

  I woke in panic. Gray light had already come to inspect our wreckage. The room reeked of our night, but Laura was gone.

  Propelled by dread, I jumped from the mattress. The first thing I registered in full consciousness was that the bathroom door was shut.

  I tried the handle. The lock had been turned.

  I thumped on the door. Madly. Calling her name.

  The bolt turned. Meekly, Laura opened the door. Her expression was pure and untroubled. Perhaps she had reached a clear-light phase. Or maybe the trip was behind her and she was just drained.

  But if her facial features had nothing to say, her eyes were seas of sorrow when I met them.

  “You know.
Don’t you?” she asked me.

  * * *

  She seemed all right. I thought she was. Then, two days later, on a barren February afternoon, Laura Saunders put on her winter boots and walked out the side door of her dormitory. She made it all the way to the convenience store down on the highway. Except for her boots, she was naked.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Angela disappeared. After the dance at Cardinal Brennan, she didn’t even go home to pack a suitcase. She just took off.

  I didn’t think she feared the law or that she was the least bit suicidal—not in the usual way. She might have been ashamed, but I couldn’t believe it. Her world had ceased to make sense in terms I could grasp. She was a mean druggie, that much was certain. Yet she was still Angela, the woman I once had desired. Furious over what she had done, I nonetheless recalled the times when we’d almost connected, two outsiders who sensed what the others didn’t. From a distance, I romanticized her decline. In the spirit of the times, I saw tragedy where there was only self-indulgence.

  Her attention flattered me up to the end. I was still too inexperienced to know that women in search of sympathy look to women. When they turn to men for pity, they’re out for revenge.

  As for Laura, I feigned compassion but felt embarrassment. And, perhaps, hatred. She had drained me. Pity would come, even empathy, in time. But first I had to know that I was safe.

  No one apologized for Angela’s deed, nor did anyone ask about Laura. Not even Red. Once again, Angela had made herself the center of all attention. The closest thing I got to an acknowledgment that anything had gone down was some ribbing from Stosh about how good the band sounded as a trio.

  When I first learned that Angela was gone, I thought of her old girlfriend Joyce, living with the biker down in Philly. But I chose to let the rest of them figure it out, if that was the answer.

  Much had changed in ways I found confusing. Not six months back, Frankie had stood outside my door in the rain, panicked by Angela’s absence of a few hours. Now he didn’t seem to care at all. It was Matty who was distraught.

  Of course, Matty didn’t say anything. But it was clear that something had gone awry. His stoic’s mask cracked at odd moments and he gave in to surges of ire. At our Monday night rehearsal, a day before Laura’s final exit and two days before our gig at the Fillmore East, he tore into me because my high E string was slightly flat.